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Open Education

What is open education?

Open Education encompasses resources, tools, and practices that are free of legal, financial, and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment (SPARC). More broadly, it is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge (opensource.com).

Growing Open: The Student Perspective

Open Educational Resources

OERs are teaching, learning, and research resources that are in the public domain or are released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (Hewlett Foundation).

These materials are freely available to users anywhere and include:

  • Textbooks
  • Readings
  • Multi-media files (images, videos)
  • Software
  • Assessment tools
  • Entire courses

Open Access

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results (SPARC).

To find open access journals in your field, visit the Directory of Open Access Journals. 

To evaluate an open access journal in your field, download Rele, Kennedy, & Blas' (2017) Journal Evaluation Tool (linked below).  

5Rs of Openness

 

Retain  

The right to make, own, and control copies of the content

Reuse

The right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g. in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Revise

The right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix

The right to combine the original or revise content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mash-up)

Redistribute

The right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others  

This material was created by David Wiley and published under a CC 4.0 license at: opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221. Adapted for Langara's use from BCcampus. 

Open Pedagogy

Open pedagogy positions teachers and students as learners together. Content becomes a dynamic, always changing category with which we engage rather than a stable set of facts to be mastered (University of Saskatchewan) .

The Open Pedagogy Notebook outlines a series of questions for self-reflection as an entry point to open pedagogy:

  • What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education?
  • What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom?
  • How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher?
  • What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?

Examples of open pedagogy include:

  • Selecting learning resources and designing learning outcomes with students 
  • Building course policies, assignments, rubrics, and syllabi collaboratively with students
  • Facilitating student-created learning environments 
  • Updating, adapting, or creating OER with students
  • Renewable assignments

License

Unless otherwise noted, the information on this website is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA).