UBC geography professor Siobhán McPhee is using technology to expand traditional learning spaces and make education accessible and relevant to more students.
UBC's Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund was created in 1991 to enrich student learning by supporting innovative educational enhancements. Starting in the 2017/2018 cycle, a focus on open educational resources (OER) was added to the criteria for new proposals.
Janette Bulkan, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Forestry, is initiating student-led projects on the UBC Wiki, an open-source platform, to facilitate students as producers of knowledge.
For David Gaertner, it is important that his students have the opportunity to create work with a broader impact, that can live beyond the classroom walls.
Since 2011, more than 47,000 UBC students have enrolled in courses that used open resources instead of traditional textbooks. At least $4.7 to $6.7 million dollars have been saved by UBC students in these courses and these figures are increasing.
For Jonathan Verrett, the use of open source tools is important as they allow others to build upon previous work and resources. "That allows educators to have access to more powerful tools to train students.”
According to Tara Robertson, accessibility librarian at CAPER-BC, accessibility can help push the open education movement even further forward. Open educational resources and content should be accessible to all people.
For Christina Hendrics the value of "peer to peer connecting is partly that students will learn a lot not just from what they hear from other people but from what they tell to other people. Conversations with other students bring such different perspectives and interpretations."
Maja Krzic: "If we don’t evolve, if we don’t try to do new things, we are trapped in how our discipline is taught and regarded. So I am hopeful that [open education] will continue to grow in popularity and use in my discipline."
“When you look at access to post-secondary education worldwide, there are a lot of countries who can’t afford to produce media like this. We can and so we should share that information …”
