Dreams of Open Education Health and Nutrition Resources

• a few cautious steps from the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC

Cyprien LomasDirector, Learning CentreFaculty of Land and Food Systems

• 40K students,

• 11 schools & faculties

• have centralised / decentralised support

• central units pushing a simple solution (WebCT)

University of British Columbia

more about UBC...

• centralised - decentralised collaboration

• WebCT campus

• Office of Learning Technologies is the owner (and champion) of WebCT

• WebCT used for everything...

• "just webCT it"

• recently switched over to Vista

UBC is the birthplace of WebCT

• WebCT used for everything...

• "just webCT it"

• recently switched over to Vista

UBC is the birthplace of WebCT

• have WebCT for free...

• perceived as ‘up to date’ to be using WebCT

• anything else would take more effort - therefore not likely

The Faculty Mindset

http://blogs.landfood.ubc.ca/ubcfarm/

• course content (powerpoints / PDFs)

• discussion board

• gradebook

• quizzes

Faculty use the following WebCT tools

Faculty of Land & Food Systems

• running Sakai & Moodle servers (quietly)

• looking for people to test them out

Faculty of Land & Food Systems

• shotgun strategy to changing culture

• Creative Commons considerations

• intellectual property

Faculty of Land & Food Systems

• would talk about ‘open’ only with very close, trusted colleagues

• used with Permission from Bjorn Thomson

Food and Nutrition

• nutrition in Vietnam

• what are the challenges?

• approached to talk about potential

Came offering help

• instructors open to sharing resources.. but

• don’t have the vocabulary for what ‘open’ means

http://internationalnutrition.landfood.ubc.ca/

started partnership

• create site to share resources

• Vista wouldn’t work :)

• ended up going with Drupal

put together a framework

• snuck in the word ‘open’

• prof asked colleagues to contribute materials

building the site...

• course content was powerpoint & WebCT

• scrutinised ownership of material in lecture slides

Phased this into a multi year plan.

• suspect that the appropriate pace is closer to five years

Conclusions

• very willing faculty

• need to work on copyright awareness

• much more work needed-mostly cultural

http://www.landfood.ubc.ca

• holding the ‘open education’ conference in August 2009

•

Next steps

• initiatives elsewhere in British Columbia

creative commons licensed flickr photo by tyfn

• thanks!

• Cyprien Lomas

• cyprien@gmail.com