Open Education 2016

Are there tried-and-true best practices to make a big impact in OER at your institution? Absolutely! Nicole Finkbeiner of Rice University's OpenStax will cover the key components partner schools utilized to increase the number of students impacted by OER by 490% in one year. Kat Flies of Central New Mexico Community College and Adam Croom of University of Oklahoma will then discuss the specifics of their OER initiatives, including how they motivated faculty to use OER, how they received support from senior administration, and how they successfully impacted thousands of their students in a short amount of time.

We believe that tools, environments, and processes are as integral to open practice as the sharing of open content, or the development of policies. Yet due to the complexity and expense of developing and supporting rich open online environments, too often this element stands as a barrier to effective action. The British Columbia Open Ed Tech Collaborative (http://bcopened.org/) is dedicated to supporting a broad community while implementing specific strategies. This work has taken place in the context of the global "indie ed tech" community, and it is hoped that this session will deepen the connection between that community and the practitioners of OER.

In this panel presentation and discussion that includes different members of the the BC Open Ed Tech Collaborative, we will briefly outline the purpose of the Collaborative, its principles and processes. We will demonstrate a Docker-based hosting environment that allows for collaborative, multi-institutional management of WordPress that allows for organizational and individual differentiation. We also outline a collaborative arrangement that allows participants to rapidly deploy a wide range of open source tools via a locally-hosted sandstorm.io application market. We are working towards a service that enables non-technical end users to install and run software downloaded from an audited app store, installed with one click - much like installing apps on Google Play or iTunes. Each app runs in a secure "containerized" environment, where it cannot interfere with other apps without permission. It also ensures that corrupted applications do not disturb the operation of others. This approach allows for rapid prototyping and experimentation, while reducing the risks associated with them.

The ability to easily share, or "clone" pre-configured and ready-to-use learning apps across courses, or organizations, offers immense potential benefits. In a sense, it would allow educators to share ready-to-use online learning tools the way we now share OER. It could also allow us to share our OER already packaged with a technology wrapper that is optimized for the learning resources. In addition to sharing our progress to this point, this session hopes to engage #OpenEd16 attendees in a discussion on how best to optimize this capacity for the open educational community, addressing challenges familiar to the early adopters of OER: how best to share? How do we ensure these approaches achieve their potential to enhance the experience of learning?

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has built a large and robust nationally recognized OER program and is the first community college to openly share a full OER degree pathway in partnership with Lumen Learning. NOVA's award-winning zELI initiative currently offers two online OER Associate Degree pathways. A third OER Degree pathway at NOVA is currently being developed on-campus with support from the VCCS Zx23 project.

In order to establish a culture of openness to support sustainable growth of OER at one of the largest and most diverse institutions in the nation, key faculty and staff had to blaze the trail of accepting open education as a professional responsibility. NOVA's comprehensive OER program was built by pioneering faculty and staff, with resources and support from a vibrant OER community, but it hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns.

During this session a panel of NOVA administrators, faculty members, instructional designers, and a college librarian will discuss their roles in introducing OER into a broad college curriculum. We will give an overview of the challenges we faced, mistakes that were made, and the lessons we learned. We will talk openly about issues of college communication, cross-campus collaboration, technology infrastructure, and competing priorities. We will take a candid look at what was necessary to get us to where we are today and suggest ways to resolve these and other potential challenges, both internally and with the help of key external partners.

Finally, we will share the process that we developed and implemented to integrate OER into NOVA's institutional culture. We will invite participants to make use of our open degree pathway available on Lumen Learning's Candela platform, and provide a roadmap that offers suggestions for introducing, implementing, and expanding OER initiatives at virtually any institution.