Open educational resources in Canada
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open educational resources and open education established nationally and provincially in Canada, and with international collaboration.
In Canada, education is exclusively a provincial or territorial responsibility, though the federal government can intervene in areas relevant to open education.
Initiatives
The open educational resources movement in Canada can be categorized in different ways, from type of initiative to geographical location to institutional initiative. The initiatives described below are categorized accordingly.Pan-Canadian initiatives
Open data
The Canadian government initiated an open data pilot project in 2012 using an open government licence, similar to the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial licence, allowing for remixing and non-commercial uses. In April 2014 Industry Canada launched Digital Canada 150, which aims to support "connecting, and protecting Canadians, economic opportunities, digital government and Canadian content."CANARIE is a federally funded corporation that manages and develops digital research infrastructure for research and education, operating the backbone network of Canada's National Research and Education Network. Along with the National Research Council's Knowledge Management and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, CANARIE supports Research Data Canada in meeting researcher needs in the coordination and promotion of data management. The strategy includes developing open science and open data to facilitate easy and open access to publications and related data resulting from federally funded research.
Creative Commons Canada
The creation and use of OER benefits from the development and use of Creative Commons licences, which provide the legal framework to share these resources. A non-profit organization, Creative Common Canada supports a legal and technical infrastructure for openness. It has created a set of free licensing tools permitting authors and developers to share, re-use and remix materials with an explicit "some rights reserved but others clearly allowed" approach to copyright. As an affiliate of the larger body, CC Canada is a collaborative initiative made up of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, BCcampus, and Athabasca University.In addition to helping users choose licences and find Creative Commons-licensed work, CC Canada is a proponent of open government and the philosophy that government data should be accessible, shareable and reusable under open licences by everyone. It is actively involved in this pursuit, studying how CC licences can be used by governments to make data freely available for public use. Another CC Canada project is being spearheaded by its legal team at CIPPIC, which is researching the development of user-friendly tools that will provide comprehensive knowledge on how to analyse and use different open licences. CC Canada has also launched a series of conferences across the country to raise awareness of Creative Commons and its potential for educators, writers, artists, and others. In May 2014, Ryan Merkley, a Canadian, was appointed CEO of Creative Commons worldwide.
Council of Ministers of Education of Canada
The Council of Ministers of Education of Canada is an organization of 13 provincial and territorial ministries of education. In response to UNESCO's 2012 Paris Declaration on OER, CMEC first discussed OER at a national meeting in 2012. The Ministers reaffirmed their commitment to open access and to adapt educational practices to the new realities of information sharing. After further discussions in 2013, the ministers unanimously endorsed the Paris Declaration. This has played an important role in the growing support for OER across Canada and has been instrumental in the establishment of OER initiatives in the western provinces.Tri-agency open access policy
The three Canadian research-funding agencies – the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada – have agreed on a draft policy supporting open access in scholarly publications. These agencies strongly support knowledge sharing and research collaboration, both domestically and internationally.National and international initiatives
Several OER initiatives in Canada feature national and international collaboration.OER universitas
offers free online university courses in collaboration with Canadian partners, offering formal credentials from the partner institutions. OERu is a consortium of more than 36 institutions and several organizations on five continents. It is dedicated to widening access and reducing the cost of post-secondary education for learners by providing OER pathways to achieve formal credentials. There are seven members of the OERu in Canada: three universities ; one community college ; and three organisations.BCcampus
BCcampus, arguably the most-active collaborative Canadian organization in the open practices arena, is a publicly funded service that has turned to open concepts and methods to create a sustainable approach to online learning for the public post-secondary institutions of British Columbia. BCcampus was created to enhance students' ability not only to identify, choose, register for and take courses, but also to apply any academic credits earned to credentials at a selected home institution. It was intended to benefit institutions through the rationalization of demand for academic opportunities from students with the supply of online courses from BC's public post-secondary institutions.BCcampus has been the leader in Canada in promoting OER with CMEC. BCcampus played a major role in the decision by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology to support and implement the Open Textbook Project, which started with a commitment to provide 40 open textbooks at the post-secondary level and is now committed to 60. BCcampus hosted a working forum on OER for senior post-secondary institution representatives in Vancouver in October 2012, with the objective of developing a common understanding of what OER could mean for the province and of building a shared vision of how to develop and use the resources. The session also studied ways that BC could take advantage of the promise of OER and, specifically, of open textbooks.
The BCcampus Shareable Online Learning Resources repository enables the licensing of, contribution to, and access to free online teaching and learning resources. Other BCcampus initiatives are also underway in support of OER, incluidng: the implementation of an initiative around apprenticeships for the trades, in partnership with BC's Industry Training Authority; and work with the North American Network of Science Labs Online to build on the success of the Remote Web-based Science Laboratory and open educational science courseware.
Alberta OER
The Campus Alberta Open Educational Resources Initiative was a 3-year $2 million government-funded initiative designed to assist with reducing the costs of a post-secondary education for students; and to provide students and faculty members with flexibility, offering updated, relevant content for learning. In March 2013, the Alberta Ministry of Innovation and Advanced Education entered a Memorandum of Understanding with BC and Saskatchewan to collaborate on the development of common OER within their respective advanced-education sectors, recognizing the benefits of sharing existing OER with a focus on mutual areas of interest. This MOU was foundational to the establishment of the ABOER Initiative. Through partnerships with BCcampus, the initiative launched an ABOER Collection within SOL*R for open educational resources created or adapted by Albertans.The ABOER Initiative funded over forty grant projects in Alberta across 31 publicly funded post-secondary institutions. In March 2017, program evaluation reported $482,000 in cost savings after one term of open textbook adoption and forecasted cost savings of $5.5 million over five years. A broader evaluation of cost savings including the adoption of ABOER-funded OER development and results of awareness initiatives remains to be evaluated. The report indicates an estimated one year of OER adoption to recuperate the investment of resource development.
eCampus Alberta funded the development of an OER awareness course and peer review of BCcampus OER.
The work of the ABOER Initiative and eCampus Alberta continued through a provincial OER Community of Practice, intended to encourage open educational practices in Alberta. In May 2017, University of Alberta hosted the first Alberta OER Summit.
eCampus Ontario
eCampusOntario.ca is the primary face of the Ontario Online Learning Consortium, a not-for-profit corporation whose membership is composed of all publicly funded colleges and universities in Ontario, and whose funding comes from the Government of Ontario. eCampus Ontario is led by CEO, David Porter. With a background in leading the open education movement in British Columbia with SFU, BCcampus, and BCIT, eCampus Ontario has already begun to bring OER and practices to the forefront of Ontario's education system. OER initiatives from eCampus Ontario include $2.6 million in open research and innovation funding, an open textbook library, and a collaborative project with Ryerson University to create an open publishing platform.Institutional initiatives
Athabasca University
There has been, and continues to be, significant OER activity at Athabasca University. It was the first university in Canada to join the OpenCourseWare Consortium and, as of 2014, remains the only Canadian institutional member. The Province of Alberta and AU hosted the 2015 OEC conference in Banff, with over 250 delegates from more than 26 countries. AU was also given an OEC ACE Award in 2014 for its highly visible OER research website, the OER Knowledge Cloud.AU is home to the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute and the UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER, both of which promote research into, and the implementation of, OER at institutional, national, and international levels. The OER Chair is also a member of the board of the OER Foundation, which hosts the OER universitas.
AU's adoption of open access began with the creation of the scholarly journal International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning in 1999, and continued in 2005 with the implementation of AUSpace, a DSpace repository of scholarly articles, theses and other documents produced within the AU community. AUPress was the first open access university press in Canada, starting in 2010, and offers over 100 volumes. Other AU open initiatives include participating in workshops and conferences, conducting a mapping of open educational activities with POERUP and eMundus Europrojects, and supporting GO-GN, the Global OER Graduate Network.
Thompson Rivers University Open Learning
Thompson Rivers University houses the former BC Open University as its distance education wing, called TRU Open Learning. It is working with several OERu partner institutions to provide initial prototype courses to be released as OER. TRU Open Learning has a robust system for prior learning assessment and recognition that includes challenge examinations and transfer of credit. This makes it a key partner for OER initiatives nationally and internationally.OCAD University
The Inclusive Design Research Centre, a research and development centre at OCAD University, consists of an international community of open practice advocates. The learning technologies and products that have been developed at by IDRC are distributed under the GNU General Public Licence. This means that the code is open source and requires users to share products under the same liberal licensing.A key project, FLOE, is currently one of the IDRC's biggest initiatives. It has received substantial funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the European Commission. FLOE takes advantage of the fact that the centre has a set of curricula that is openly licensed and can be repurposed and re-used to make content accessible. This makes FLOE heavily dependent on OER, which presents an optimal learning environment to meet the needs of all learners, including those with disabilities. FLOE advances the strengths and values of open education and encourages pedagogical and technical innovation. It also promotes OER for content portability, ease of updating, internationalization and localization, content re-use and repurposing, and more efficient and effective content discovery. FLOE's work is international and broad. For example, to support adoption in Africa and other areas where mobile devices are more prevalent than Internet access, FLOE creates tools and services for delivery as OER via audio, text messages, and the small screens found on popular cellphones. These same tools and services are intended to support accessibility through inclusive design.