University-wide network aims to increase awareness and support for open education resources | UToday | University of Calgary

"The pursuit and open sharing of knowledge is at the heart of academic work. Open Education Week (March 27-31) celebrates the worldwide movement to collaboratively share and adapt educational resources to make that knowledge — and ideas for how it can be learned — openly available to learners and teachers.

At the University of Calgary, a significant number of individual academic staff are already engaged — often with their students — in creating or adapting valuable open educational resources (OER). In most universities, institutional infrastructure to enable this work is lagging behind practice. The University of Calgary is proud to mark Open Education Week 2017 by announcing the launch of a new initiative designed to provide institutional support for adopting and adapting open educational resources (OERs).

In response to a social action movement led by students concerned about both the cost and relevance of learning resources, a university-wide OER network involving students, teachers and staff developed a three-pronged strategy to increase awareness of and support for OER adoption. The implementation of that strategy will begin in July 2017, when an OER advocacy team consisting of Quazi Hassan, PhD, and Kyle O’Keefe, PhD, and PhD candidate Khan Rahaman, will undertake a year-long initiative to encourage the adoption of OERs."