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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. It maximizes the power of the Internet to make education more affordable, accessible and effective (SPARC).

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, and 
  • Even entire courses. 

Open Pedagogy

Open pedagogy refers to “Teaching and learning practices where openness is enacted within all aspects of instructional practice" (Paskevicius, 2016).

Examples of open pedagogy include:

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

To browse (and contribute) examples of open pedagogy in practice, visit the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

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 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).  

License

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