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Workshops and events can increase awareness and support for open education and open educational resources (OER) within your institution. Faculty and staff gain valuable skills and approaches for developing open resources. At institutions in British Columbia, like Douglas College, BCIT, and UBC, open working groups have developed and delivered a range of events from showcases to open courses to skills-based workshops. In the following section, we will look at some of the approaches taken to these workshops and events and what has been most successful.
Questions to Consider
- What events does your institution or organization already have that support open?
- Are there institutes or pre-existing programs where there is an opportunity to host an OER or open workshop or event?
- What are aspects of open that you can use to showcase open practices at your institution? Are there people in open education whose work you can share?
Open education workshops
One approach to both supporting and raising awareness for open education is to host workshops focused on some of the knowledge and skills required to adopt, adapt, and create open resources, and implement open pedagogy and open practices. These workshops can focus on licensing, tool use, finding and using OER, or developing OER using an open resource creation tool such as Pressbooks. By focusing on tangible skills, these workshops can offer a valuable entry point for people just getting started in open and fill skill gaps for those more familiar with open practices. These workshops can also create opportunities to collaborate between different units such as the library, teaching and learning centres, and faculty centres. You can find information about developing and running many of these workshops online. In the following section, we have listed some common skills-based workshops and included where you can find open resources to run them with.
Workshop examples
Finding, using, and remixing OER resources
One approach to engaging instructors, staff, faculty, and students around open education and OER is to run a workshop focusing on finding, using, and remixing OER. This type of workshop is useful for people starting to consider adopting OER because it provides participants with an answer to a common challenge in education: how to find resources to use in their presentations and courses. See In Practice: Find, Use, and Remix OER for Your Courses in this chapter for a description of a workshop like this.
Pressbooks workshops
Pressbooks is an open-source software that enables book creators to design and produce an open textbook or resource for the web and export it into multiple file formats like PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and various editable formats. BCcampus hosts its own instance of Pressbooks and all faculty, instructors, and staff working for post-secondary institutions in B.C. can use this service by registering for an account. Workshops about Pressbooks are a way to help provide faculty w