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Week in Review Nov 22/2019
The big event of the week was heading to Victoria for a one day planning day with the Open Team followed by an all-BCcampus retreat. One of the things that I love about BCcampus is all the exposure I’m getting to how meetings, planning, retreats are facilitated and set up, and of course getting to experience different liberating structures. I’d really love to up my facilitation game so I’m paying more attention to all of the small details. One of the things that I thought worked really well for the Open Team planning day was having each person do a 5 minute lightening talk on what they were working on…
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Week in Review Nov 15/2019
The short week threw me for a surprise – for some reason Remembrance Day does this to me every year. On Monday I got out to my local Remembrance Day celebration at the aptly named Memorial Park, surrounded by neighbours and @levalee who was there with her 95 year old dad! She shared this great article about him and his role in a fascinating piece of Canadian Veteran and Chinese Canadian history. This was followed up by 2 days of planning and strategizing by the BCcampus Teaching and Learning Team, full of liberating structures and buckets. We ecocycled, 1-2-4 all’ed, spiral journaled, and knotworked our way through our current and…
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Reflecting on a decade
This week I’m wrapping up almost a decade at JIBC (9 years and 7 months to be exact). This is almost 3x longer than any other stay with an employer and it feels important to pause and reflect on this formative time. I started at JIBC as an Educational Technology Specialist. It was a brand new position, with no rules and few expectations other than “we need you to harness the online learning activity that is happening here”. It came with a 40k budget and an office of one, but this office of one had a door, a huge window, and a view of the pond. I had spent the…
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What I learned this summer – LXPs, the content marketplace and what it means for higher education
I’m 3 weeks into a 5 week vacation and while most people catch up on some reading or writing, I’ve balanced my time between a fantastic staycation and diving into the world of LXPs. LXPs aren’t an acronym I’ve been hearing around my higher ed circles, and if that’s the case for you as well, buckle up. This is a quick and dirty post on what I learned, and may lack the linking required to dig deeper on all the reading I uncovered, but it’s still summer and I’m still on vacation. What are LXPs? An LXP (also sometimes called an LEP) stands for a Learning Experience Platform. I first…
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Open Education Practices – A framework and self-assessment tool for institutions
In a previous post, I wrote about how research on blended learning could provide some insights on open education initiatives. I pointed to an article by Lim and Wang (2016) who provide a useful framework and self-assessment tool for evaluating blended learning initiatives that I thought could be adapted to institutional open initiatives. The article is called A Framework and Self‐Assessment Tool for Building the Capacity of Higher Education Institutions for Blended Learning and it’s part of a volume of work published by UNESCO in 2017 called Blended learning for quality higher education: selected case studies on implementation from Asia-Pacific. I took a stab at tweaking this framework and am…
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The Future of Ed Tech in Higher Ed when Open Source is a Radical Solution
Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity to be a keynote speaker at the Open Apereo 2019 conference. This is the first time a keynote I’ve done has been recorded so I’m posting the recording as well as the text script (even thought I diverged from it on occasion). I have nothing but huge gratitude to all the wonderful organizers and people I met at the conference in LA and I sincerely hope that our complementary worlds of open education and Apereo will overlap more in our future activities. It is a great pleasure to be here today, not only because I am a huge admirer of Apereo but also because…
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Other voices in the world of experts and gurus
This week I attended a leadership course at a institution well known for its leadership courses. The course was expertly designed in terms of facilitation, activities, and careful thought to drawing on the expertise and contexts of the participants. At the same time that the course was happening, Jody Wilson-Raybould, a well respected Indigenous woman occupying a very senior position in Canadian federal politics was being raked over the coals for doing her job and upholding leadership integrity in a contentious political environment. So it was hard not to notice that the content gave most of the space to prominent leadership gurus – Stephen Covey, David Rock, Sam Kaner –…
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What can open learn from blended learning initiatives?
In my reviewing of BC research on open, I came across a 2015 study by Irwin DeVries that used a comparative case study methodology of OERu course development with a case from FOSS development (p.77). I’ve done my share of case study research, and the comparative case study design has been one I’ve stayed away from, because I’ve never been able to reconcile how you’d avoid an apples to oranges comparison situation. Irwin’s article illustrates that this is not only doable, but also offers some possibilities that I hadn’t considered. I’m currently in the process of preparing a research proposal of institutional case study research on a few BC institutions…
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OpenEd Week @KPU
I had the privilege of being one of the keynotes at KPU’s Open Education Week, a fantastic day that was co-organized by KPU, UBC, Douglas, SFU, and BCIT. There is nothing better than following a student keynote, and Aran Armutlu kept our attention on the things that matter in open…students and affordability of higher education, while also touching on the impact of open pedagogy. He talked about his first experience as a student discovering his course used a zero cost textbook and since the instructor, Jennifer Kirkey was also in attendance it was a really nice shout out to instructors doing good work and the impact it has on students.…
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BC Open Research
Last week, BCcampus published a blog post on a summary I did of the landscape of research in BC on open. I’m reposting it here so that I don’t lose it, forget about it, or any of the things that happen when websites change. I’ve realized in the course of curation OER in Other Languages that more copies is sometimes better when it comes to these kinds of efforts. In October of 2018, I began a secondment to BCcampus as Researcher, Open Education Practices. After being in an Administrator position for the last nine years, I’m grateful that this research role has afforded me the opportunity to do some catch…
