Festival of Learning

Open Session Limited to 40 Participants (First-Come, First-In)

This session will explore how coursework can be leveraged to create open sources for textbooks, support materials, and lesson plans. The workshop takes as its central premise the idea that students should have a stake in developing open educational resources for their peers as part of their educational experience.

By looking at how an introductory English / Academic Writing / Composition course can be structured around students writing, developing, assessing, and synthesizing the very resources students need, we'll think about the classroom as a space for building open educational resources (such as a course textbook).

We'll discuss assignments that ask students to argue for a consistent and relevant course policies, allow students to assess the relevance of and select textbook materials--building an open textbook as they work through the course; and that encourage students to set legacy guidelines for best practices, workarounds, and workflows that will help their peers taking the course in the future.

This workshop will outline all the parameters for making a course into a semester-long endeavour to create an open textbook, create ancillary materials relevant to the textbook, and create tertiary materials to help their peers be successful.

We'll look at how the classroom, while keeping traditional components of curriculum--grades, argumentation, essay writing, summary, discussion--in play, can become a space for developing open education resources as part of the process toward deploying useful assignments, open access, and shared knowledge. 

Presenters 
David N. Wright, Faculty Member, Coordinator, Research and Innovation, Director of the Digital Culture Lab and The Douglas College Maker Lab, Douglas College