Open education can be understood as a collection of practices that utilize online technology to freely share knowledge. UBC’s open learning and education initiatives are based on the belief that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit for contributing to teaching and learning; that concepts and ideas can be linked in unusual and surprising ways; and that learning should extend beyond institutional walls. By supporting open learning projects and frameworks, such as the UBC Wiki or through partnerships with open courseware providers, UBC is opening the doors to the world. If you have any questions, please contact open.learning@ubc.ca.
Featured Projects:
MOOCs
UBC has partnered with edX and Coursera to offer free, publicly available non-credit courses. Courses delivered through these platforms are structured after Massive Open and Online Courses (MOOCs), an emerging delivery model predicated on providing free and open access to courses to large numbers of students.
Arts One Open
Arts One Open is an open, online extension or complement to UBC's Arts One program that enables anyone to join this voyage of discovery and critical analysis. It provides Creative Commons licensed recordings and other material from lectures given by some of UBC’s most experienced and distinguished teachers. These instructors hope to provoke you to think in new ways about authors from Plato to Shakespeare, Defoe to Coetzee, and about issues such as knowledge, monstrosity, science, and politics.
LAW423b: Video Game Law
The interactive entertainment and video game industries are governed by a variety of international and domestic laws dealing with intellectual property, communications, contracts, tort liability, obscenity, employment, defamation, and freedom of expression. The goal of this course is to continue scholarship in the area and the instructors are providing open access to course content, including lecture notes and slides, as well as open discussion on the course site.
Evidence-based Science Education in Action
An open collection of video demonstrations of classroom, lab and other instructional strategies which was inspired by the observation that instructors are most likely to consider trying new teaching strategies after watching a colleague or a video that demonstrates the strategy in action in a real setting. The videos are not documentaries or testimonials, but are demonstrations of students learning, and teaching strategies in action. The strategies shown have been implemented at the University of British Columbia and University of Colorado as part of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) and The University of Colorado Science Education Initiative (CU-SEI).
LAST100: Intro to Latin American Studies
LAST100, “Introduction to Latin American Studies” provides an overview of the culture and society of Latin America from ancient to contemporary times, and from Argentina to Mexico. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the region is constructed and represented, and to the cultural politics of race, gender, and class. The course website provides provides Creative Commons licensed videos and other materials from the instructor and students.
UBC Library Open Education Guide
The UBC Library guide to open education resources including faculty toolkits for open education, open access and open textbooks, a vetted list of open education repositories, and evaluation criteria for assessing open education resources. It also includes rubrics and promotional material on open education topics.
Neuroanatomy at UBC
Neuroanatomy at UBC is a website that includes photographs, diagrams, illustrations, MRI scans, and 3D reconstructions of functionally important parts of the human brain. The website is maintained by Dr. Claudia Krebs, a senior instructor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at UBC. All original content on the Neuroanatomy at UBC website is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 license.
Open Badges Project
Digital badges are emerging as a vital component of open, flexible learning systems as a way to signify levels of participation as well as the achievement of skills and knowledge. Within UBC, badge technologies have also been identified as an essential horizon to be explored in realizing our flexible learning potential. This FL-TLEF funded project will convene UBC badge ‘early-adopters’ representing 3 programs, together with CTLT expertise, to collectively pioneer badge-based learning pathways.
MATH 105 Probability Module
A set of open resources, which focus specifically on probability, for students in MATH 105 at UBC. The content on the MATH 105 Probability Module has been released into the public domain.
The Infinite Series Module
Online resources for undergraduate students studying integral calculus, specifically on infinite sequences and series. Content on the ISM website and all of its subdomains are under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
Open UBC Week
Open UBC is held in conjunction with International Open Access Week, which encourages the academic community to come together to share and learn about open scholarship initiatives locally and worldwide. Open UBC showcases a week of diverse events highlighting areas of open scholarship in which UBC’s researchers, faculty, students and staff participate.
Image attribution: International Open Access Week Logo. Created by Andrea Higginbotham. CC-BY.
Math Exam Resource Wiki
The Math Exam Resources wiki is a community project started in March 2012 by graduate students at the UBC Math Department and it features hints and worked out solutions to past math exams. The goal of the project is to provide an open and free educational resource to undergraduate students taking math courses, with a strong emphasis for first and second year courses. The provided solutions do not simply provide what the answer is, but instead focus on the processes that it takes to solve the problem.
Phylo: The Trading Card Game
Phylo is a project that began as a reaction to the following nugget of information: Kids know more about Pokemon creatures than they do about real creatures. We think there’s something wrong with that. Apparently, so do many others. Phylo is a card game that makes use of the wonderful, complex, and inspiring things that inform the notion of biodiversity; and an exercise in crowd sourcing, open access, and open game development.
SPAN312: Murder, Madness, and Mayhem
The UBC SPAN312 class ("Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation"), taught by Jon Beasley-Murray contributed to Wikipedia during Spring 2008. the collective goals were to bring a selection of articles on Latin American literature to featured article status (or as near as possible). More background information available here.
HIST 396: North American Environmental History
Digital Tattoo
The goal of the Digital Tattoo project is to raise questions, provide examples and links to resources to encourage you to think about your presence online, navigate the issues involved in forming and re-forming your digital identity and learn about your rights and responsibilities as a digital citizen. It's original content is published under the Creative Commons-Attribution 3.0 license to allow for sharing and re-publishing.
Open Education Community of Practice
The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology supports Open Education in various ways, including a community of practice around the sharing of educational resources and practices that are freely available for anyone to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.
HLWIKI International
The objective of the HLWIKI is to build a health sciences librarianship wiki with an international perspective, but also to emphasize issues affecting practice in Canada. For example, it focuses on expert searching to support the development of systematic reviews in medicine, and searching for the grey literature. The HLWIKI International Advisory supports the Creative Commons principles of sharing and collaboration (i.e. copyleft).
Towards Open Education
The notion of “open education”, whether it be in the context of large initiatives such as the OpenCourseWare Consortium, the British Columbia open textbook initiative, institutional Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) or countless grassroots efforts, has been growing in prominence in higher education in British Columbia. Toward Open Education hopes to leverage a combination of BC-specific case studies and focused resources to produce a web framework that will deliver impactful summaries and meaningful engagements around open education best practices, ongoing challenges, and practical tips relevant to BC educators and students.
The Learning Commons
The Learning Commons is an evolving collection of UBC-selected learning resources that guide students through a process of discovery. Through an emphasis on student-driven initiatives and shared-decision making, the Learning Commons enriches the academic support and enhance the experience of all UBC students. It's original content is published under the Creative Commons-Attribution 3.0 license to allow for sharing and re-publishing.
Virtual Soil Science Learning Resources
The goal of Virtual Soil Science Learning Resources (VSSLR) group is to enhance soil science education through cooperation and innovative approaches to teaching and learning. The site features educational tools and courses developed to address the following topics: basic soil science principles, soil classification, land-use impacts on soil quality, and raising awareness about soil as an important natural resource.
ETEC510 Design Wiki
An iterative course wiki on technology enhanced learning environments that has evolved over several years.
FNH200: Exploring our Foods
A UBC food, nutrition and health course with open content and discussions, created in conjunction the UBC Wiki and with WebCT Vista.
ETEC522: Ventures in Learning Technology
The course provides an online immersion in the global learning technologies marketplace with particular emphasis on emerging markets for learning technologies in public and commercial domains. The course site provides access to open content, open discussions, and student resource production.
Open e-Portfolios
Open e-Portfolio projects have been developed in different teaching and learning contexts across UBC. These open e-Portfolios provide a space for the collection of learning artifacts, as well as for reflection on learning goals and experiences. They place an emphasis on student ownership, creativity and flexibility in the development and support of these spaces. e-Portfolios are owned by students and can be shared publically or maintained privately depending on student goals.
