I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing people during the past several years to grow the “open” initiative at the University of Saskatchewan. There’s been my colleagues at the teaching and learning centre, the folks at our distance education unit, librarians, the instructors and graduate students who have done all of the hard work, and all of those outside of the U of S who make this possible (I’m looking at you BCcampus).
As a result of all of this work, the U of S has saved students more than $1.8 million since the 2014-2015 academic year, produced several new and adaptations of open textbooks and ancillary resources, and interest in open pedagogy continues to grow. With all of this in mind (plus the 47 percent increase in the number of students using OER instead of commercial textbooks since this year compared to last), I realized that it was time to create a brand new strategic plan because, frankly, we’d exceeded our wildest expectations, plus we have a new Learning Charter.
While nothing about open is directly mentioned in the Learning Charter, I realized that OER and open pedagogy enable much of the commitments the university makes within in. I’ve been drafting a new broad plan for open at the U of S, tying the components within it to specific commitments in the Learning Charter.
I started by going through the Learning Charter and writing on the white board in my office the commitments I thought linked well to open. I then invited Wendy James, our Manager of Professional and Curriculum Development (my boss) and Stryker Calvez, the Manager of Indigenous Education Initiatives to come to my office separately (it’s not a big space) and I talked through the connections that I saw. They agreed with what I was saying, gave me some initial advice and I went to work on the plan.
I built it in a Google Doc with the intention of, once Wendy gave me the go ahead, to share it openly to get feedback from throughout the open community.
You can leave comments within the document, on this blog post, or in-person if you’re going to be at OpenEd in Phoenix next week.
Image courtesy of Tracy Roberts under a CC-BY license.
