Exploring Open Ontario at the OEO Summit

Photo by Kristopher Kinsinger on Unsplash

On Sunday, November 11, 2018, at the second Open Education Ontario (OEO) Summit, thirty-plus pairs of experienced and rising Ontario Open Rangers generously shared their time and gathered in Toronto for an afternoon of workshops and connecting. There was a Keynote from Billy Meinke of University of Hawai’i Manoa, Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination and an Open Educational Resource Production workshop from Billy featuring his OER Production Workflow. He also shared this OER on How to OER (so meta!) that made cool use of H5P interactivity in Pressbooks.

In addition, a great session called Growing Open Education Initiatives was led by Ali Versluis of University of Guelph and Jessica O’Reilly of Cambrian College. Finally, there was an end-of-day roundup with the eCampusOntario Open Education (OE) Fellows Helen DeWaard, Maureen Glynn, Laura Killam, Aaron Langille, Jessica O’Reilly, and James Skidmore leading an exploration called Blazing Open Trails!

The OE Fellows shared ideas that emerged from their conversations with Open Rangers as part of a panel at the Technology Enabled Seminar and Showcase (TESS). We asked a variety of questions about what was working well for them in open spaces, what they needed in terms of support and connection with other open advocates, what they needed from their institutions and more. Some common findings were that Rangers were already engaged in a lot of open education activities, they wanted to plant small seeds of openness at their institutions, they wanted more connection with each other, more support from colleagues and their institutions, policy dialogue opportunities to talk about intellectual property and open licensing, small funding opportunities for adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources (OER), and open tools to host and explore open pedagogy. This was by no means an exhaustive list! If you’re curious to know if you have an Open Ranger (or Open Rangers) on your campus, send us an email and we’ll connect you.

Any and all Ontario open education and OER advocates interested in joining the Ontario Open Rangers are welcome to connect and be Rangers. We meet on a quarterly basis, share ideas for open education advocacy on Ontario campuses, share resources, and connect with each other for collaboration and community. If you’re interested in becoming an Open Ranger and learning more, connect with us at open@ecampusontario.ca