Festival of Learning 2018

Open working groups have a significant impact on supporting and developing the capacity of administration, libraries and faculties to adopt and adapt open resources and open educational practices at post-secondary institutions across British Columbia. These working groups, which often consist of a diverse range of roles and people, use an inclusive, cooperative, and collaborative approach to increase the capacity for open practices at their institution. This year, in cross-institutional collaboration with BCcampus, representatives from open working groups at UBC, Emily Carr, KPU, SFU, CapU, TRU, Douglas College, JIBC and BCIT have been working together to develop an open resource that supports open working groups.

Our panel will share ways best practices for organizing open working groups and ways in which such groups can support open education in post-secondary institutions. Using the Community of Praxis model to describe the reflection and action approach taken by these groups (Anderson and Freebody 2012), we will also share some of what has worked best in maintaining and sustaining open working groups, and what has not worked. Finally, we will share some of the open practices that we used in this project, such as open design, resource sprints and collaborative development.

For the facilitated discussion, participants will work together using 1-2-4-All to generate a Top 10 list of how we can support open education at our institutions.