Festival of Learning 2018

Openness has a long genealogy in education and extending learning opportunities to a wider range of audiences has been an important aspect of educational practices (Edwards, 2015). In this presentation (approx. 45 min), we provide an overview of Open Education Resources (OER) initiatives in the Power Engineering Department at BCIT and describe how this rapidly evolving initiative enhance teaching and learning between BCIT and Linnaeus University (LU).

Jung, Bauer and Heaps (2017) found in their research that the lack of supplementary materials has been a significant issue for faculty. We faced the same challenge and following the BCIT OER initiatives, we worked together to design and test simulator labs (SIMLABs) as ancillary resources for Thermodynamics and Thermal Power Plant Simulator (TPPS) courses.

We tested the SIMLABs with both BCIT and LU students. According to Allen and Seaman (2016), most higher education faculty are unaware of OER however they are interested and some are willing to try. Not only were our tests excellent at increasing the OER awareness of LU faculty at Kalmar Maritime Academy, but the tests were also received positively by our students at home and abroad.

Coughlan and Perryman (2011) assert the emphasis in OER production has been on quantity rather than the ways in which OER might be used. In our presentation, we will share our current application of SIMLABs and how the use of SIMLABs could be expanded in other teaching contexts.

Many open practitioners characterize openness as not just a practice but an ethos, a commitment to democratic practices (Mackness, 2013; Neylon, 2013 as cited in Cronin, 2017). While this is the underlying motivation for us, we are also aware of the fact that teaching staff operate in an array of constraints. Several scholars suggest that institutional policy is a key enabling factor for academic staff to contribute their teaching materials as OER (Cox & Trotter, 2016). In our presentation, we will address these issues because we believe changing institutional culture to support OER can start small - whether it is a set of ancillary resources or an entire open textbook (SPARC, 2017).