 I'm delighted to have two very eminent and interesting speakers to offer to you today. We're going to have half an hour each, which will include their presentation plus a chance for questions from those of you in the room and also from those online. And welcome everyone online too. We're going to start off with Jo Axe, who's Associate Dean at Royal Roads. She's going to be talking about the subject that so many of us are interested in now, which is OERs. She tells me she's from the UK originally and went to Canada in the 80s. And she's been a business woman as well as an academic. So I think all learning technologies will particularly benefit from your both pragmatic and conceptual approach. So I'm sure you'd rather hear from her rather than me. So over to you Jo, and off we go. Thank you. Thank you very much. So as was mentioned, I'm the Associate Dean in the Faculty of Management at Royal Roads University. Royal Roads is in Victoria in British Columbia. I don't know how many of you have been to British Columbia, but it's not too different the climate where I live myself from what it is here. What I'm going to do today is I'm talking about, there are two main elements. One is the bridging programme that we are doing at Royal Roads, which bridges students coming into our BCOM programme. The other component is the open educational resource. So we took the bridging programme and we put it open, which was done through a grant from BC Campus, which allowed us to have some resources to do that process. So what I'm going to talk about firstly is to put it into context is the post-secondary education in British Columbia. Now, where I came from, it's now 20 to 4 in the morning. So I had asked a couple of my colleagues to join me online so we could have a live interaction. Unfortunately, they were asleep, so they preferred giving a video presentation. So I have two very short video clips just to put things into context. One is from our Dean Pedro Marquez, who is an international himself from Mexico, has a very interesting perspective and is going to just discuss post-secondary education in British Columbia to put it into the context. The second person is Mary Burgess, who is our director for CETET, which is our Centre for Educational Technologies, Learning Technologies. So we'll have a couple of clips. I'm going to talk briefly about BC Campus that they gave as part of the grant that allowed us to complete this process. I'll put it into the context going smaller, as in Royal Roads University, and what our students look like. I am completely not familiar with teaching in lecture halls. We have maximum class sizes of around 55 students. So we usually teach in group, and we use dialogue, walk around the class, discuss things. It's a little bit different from the lecturing that I've done, actually, once in another venue. So a little bit different for me. So first of all, we'll be talking about the opening of the bridge and how the process we took to get to having it available for use. What I wanted to do first was, is everybody familiar with Canada? It's a big country. So I just wanted to put it into context because not everybody realises that my mother included. I was born in Doncaster, and she still thinks I live in Vancouver, which is actually not the same as Vancouver Island. So I just wanted to put it into a slightly context here so that you can actually see where I'm talking about. Vancouver Island is about the size of Wales. So the population of the island is, I think, around 400,000 people. It's not very big. Most of them live in the Victoria area. So the place that I work is Colwood. We have one of the only universities that has a castle on campus. So the university here is, whoops, lost it. It's right here. So it's on Aboriginal land. It's on Coast Salish land, which is many of the communities in Canada are established on the territories of the First Nations peoples. Ours is on Coast Salish. So I just wanted to acknowledge that before I continue with the slide presentation. So first I'd like you to hear from Dean Pedro Marquez who's going to just chat a little bit about the context of post-secondary education. Hello, how do you do? My name is Pedro Marquez and I'm delighted to join you today. I've been invited by Dr Joe Axe, Associate Dean at the Faculty of Management at Royal Roads University to say a few words and share a few ideas with you about British Columbia's post-secondary education system. It is my pleasure. I quickly would like to share with you that I actually attended the university in Mexico, came to Canada for my master's and my PhD and then went back to teach for our very large prestigious Mexican university and now I've been with Royal Roads University for the last four years. So I've had an opportunity to experience both the Canadian and Mexican systems as a student and as an administrator and professor, which I think it gives me a little bit of a general perspective and opportunity to make a few comments from Dominique Comparison. So it is my pleasure to share some of the ideas with you. The British Columbia system is part of the larger Canadian system. The one in the province of British Columbia on the west coast of Canada is integrated and composed by 25 different institutions. They run between 1900 and 2000 different programs in many, many different levels. Out of these 25 institutions, 11 are universities or public funded, 11 are colleges or public funded and there are three institutes with very specific mandates and objectives. There is parallel to this publicly funded system, a private colleges and universities offering programs as well to different needs of society, but really the strength, the 40 of British Columbia's higher education system lies in the public education system. Colleges, they offer programs, short term programs in the trades and diplomas ranging from very technical skills into more professional disciplines. I believe that they are doing a very good job and they complement what private colleges are actually doing mostly in the sense of attracting international students and supporting their advances through the Canadian economy in sense of advancing the language skills and social adjustment processes. The 11 universities are very strong, this is my honest absolute opinion, ranging from very specialized institutions like Royal Roads University who has been created with a special purpose of serving the working professional to the University of British Columbia which I'm convinced that is one of the top best universities around the world. These universities offer from a diploma undergraduate degrees to master's and doctoral programs in many different disciplines so you would find a very wide spectrum and portfolio of different programs for you to take within the BC system. I believe that there are some tremendous features that make this system very positive, very strong. There are some other challenges that they will have to deal in the years to come. Among the features that I believe are important, highlighting are the fact that the system is pretty well balanced in terms of disciplines, approaches, lenses. It is pretty well balanced in the sense of their geographical scope and reach. Although most of the universities are located within the greater Victoria and greater Vancouver areas, the college system does spread out throughout the whole system. I think that they do have a very great strength in graduating with individuals not only with great professional skills but also capacity to add value and become valuable members of society, responsibility, civility, citizenship. The system has also done a very good job in reacting to the multicultural needs or the multicultural Canadian population. Although these universities have not yet accomplished a significant amount of cooperation in order to do a better job in attracting and retaining top talent from across the world through their university programs. As well, I believe that the programs are very interdisciplinary, which is nothing but good news for the overall composition of the BC system. In terms of challenges for the future, I think that there are a couple, but probably the most important is the end of the baby boom. Society in Canada, as in the rest of the world, is changing, and now that constant flow of students that demand traditional programs is coming to an end, and so universities will have to respond to the demand need to evolve from a training into a knowledge management institution. So the portfolio and pedagogical approaches will probably have to adjust. The system will face some financial stresses as well. The common denominator has been a particular financial model, which is the one that has been used by most institutions in North America. That will be under pressure in the years to come simply because of the general financial situation that North American institutions and governments are facing around the world, not only in North America. I also believe that there is a need for more collaboration and support in an integrated strategy for how to attract and retain international students so that they actually go back to their countries of origin and add value and expand the prestige and reputation of the Canadian films, or maybe to stay in Canada, particularly British Columbia, and enrich the changing needs of the Canadian society. Overall, I believe that the balance is very rich. This is a great place to come and the institutions of this place are ready for receiving you. I hope that this quick, very quick review and description of the BC higher education system is useful towards your discussions. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure meeting you. Good luck. Just so you know, I told Petro that he had two minutes. I should have known better because Petro does not talk in two-minute slots. That gives you a little bit of an overview of what British Columbia educational system is. It's not a lot different from the challenges that you're facing here, so that the financial constraints are also challenging. Our own university is slightly different because our mandate is a little bit different from other universities, and we are not as highly funded by the government. We still get some funding, but not as many. The grant that we received was from BC Campus, which contributed a small amount to the project that we were doing. What they tried to do is connect all the institutions in BC. They are talking about and they have several things that we take part in that will allow us to share our resources and students have access to different types of degree completion plans. So Royal Roads University itself, the way we usually teach is teams and cohorts. The cohorts move through the program together. They are set on teams, usually five, six people on a team. Up to 30% in the faculty management is based on teamwork of their assessed grade, final grade. So it's really important that they work together. When we have students from different backgrounds, different ethnic groups, we have challenges in the classroom. So one of the reasons for developing the bridge was because of the challenges that we were faced with. The blended learning is the model that we use. There are many different versions of blended learning, I understand that. The model that we particularly use is for our online students they come in for residency at the beginning. They take a block of courses online and then they have another residency at the end. So they have an opportunity to work on the teams in the face-to-face environment before they leave to go online. The learning community is a big piece. We spend time at the beginning of all the programs in the faculty management, helping students understand what it means to be part of a learning community, how they can contribute, what they can expect. And we primarily focus on graduate students and students in their third and fourth years. So we don't get a lot of students straight out of high school. And mainly the students in the faculty management itself are people who have at least three years work experience for the undergrad programs and seven years work experience for the graduate programs. So you can tell that the type of environment they're in they have a lot of skills, background knowledge to bring into the classroom so that all affects what they're doing. Now the bridge itself we call it the bridge to become. It's an opportunity for students to get together online to learn a little bit about each other to start building that learning community and the idea behind it was to break down some of the problems such as the one that this student quoted at the beginning. So when we started the project which was in 2005 we interviewed a few students one of the ones said they could not wait to get back to their place their safe haven after the classroom because they didn't feel safe in the classroom. So we didn't want them to have that feeling that they were marginalised in the classroom we wanted to give them an opportunity to discuss things before students came on campus so that they were a bit more of an even playing field. And a staff member again had a similar comment from the BECOM student she said that what they tell her is I came for BECOM I didn't come for an international experience that's not why I'm here. So what we wanted to do is try and emphasise to those students the value of having that international experience in the classroom and even though there were domestic Canadian students that coming into a classroom that had students from India, China career all over the world was beneficial and that they could learn a lot and share a lot with those students. So what we did was we invented we created something that I know has been used in other places and I know this one I think called Stepping Stones in the UK that was used and we incorporated some of the ideas and built on that. So what we had was a number of activities that the students take part in. They have a general orientation to the school, the university and their programme so that's just information downloaded to them. Then they have a get acquainted site so they go on and they post a couple of things we ask some questions and then they start a discussion and what we wanted them to do was to try to get in an environment where it's not just about them it's about finding out about what's going on in other people's lives. There's a proactive host of discussion so we had several places where the students could go in and learn about things that they were going to be doing with somebody who'd already been there. So university life would come on and tell them about disability programmes so in case they needed to know things about that. We would have alumni who'd come back in who'd taken part in competitions our case competition and they would tell them how to do that. Enterprise was another group that came in and did something for that so there are lots of things that they could ask about. There was a welcoming Q&A again just a discussion area and then we did something called dinner and a movie. So what we did was we gave them a movie, you have to read this movie watch this movie at some point during the week here's a recipe and watch the movie, eat the food and then we'll talk about it. So it was actually quite an interesting exercise. Presentation skills we had a brief discussion on that and it was preparation which they didn't have to do but it was there if they wanted to so they could do the readings ahead. Then this key piece on learning community individual reflection on learning community they had some reading to do and then a discussion and they had to have a short biography about sorry a short exercise that they had to write about what they thought learning community meant to them. We took that into the foundations which is number 11 and provided them with the opportunity to discuss it further and to develop a learning community themselves. So this all started online they didn't know each other and there was a great opportunity for dropping into other people's posts and chatting that way. So what they said about it they wanted to create connections so they came in there wanting to do something gave them that familiarity so when they walked in the classroom they knew people on the first day and started them thinking about learning community so what did it mean to be part of an ROU classroom what did it mean to come to the university learning community it was a small step, lots of additional things that they could do it gave them confidence and without it they would have been scared those were the good things there were also some things they didn't like so one student said nobody was posting on it no interaction too much pressure so we were saying you have to do this it's mandatory they didn't like it pushed back they went into panic mode because it was one of those things where for an introvert didn't really want to do that yet they weren't mentally ready for it so it created stress didn't have enough time because I was working and when they got a similar background so this individual noticed that students who had similar things going on they actually focused on students who were like themselves rather than what we wanted or hoped they would do is try and find things out about students that they didn't know about I'm going to skip over that because I see the time is and I will go over some of the points that Mary pointed out that actually is one of the most recent pictures of Mary that I could find so what we did was we took this course and it's one of many of the resources that we've got at Roll Roads that are actually posted for everybody to share we wanted to share it but not just sort of drop it out there and let everybody figure it out for themselves so what we tried to do was make sure we had all the information so it was a collaborative effort across the units we offered technical advice, comments and rationale so we looked at what people were doing and why they were doing it and we actually had got into exchange between faculty and the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies it was the highly customizable items so there were some of those things that had to be noted so that we could make sure that people understood why they were there and then we embedded some pedagogy in it so there are notes throughout this OER so with the OER we first had to obtain permission because not everybody wanted to take part in this some faculty members that don't want my stuff up there please leave me out of it we obtained a copy of the course so it's a template and then you prepare the course so with quality control there are several check boxes that we all have as I'm sure everybody else would have with their quality control there were privacy and copyright issues as you probably can understand there are a lot of things that you can't post online if it's got student information in so we had to remove those things out we had to look at what we had put it was accessible and then there are creative commons and attributing share alike licenses which I think you also have the same types of issues challenges and then the last piece when we've done all those things was to add that pedagogy piece so that we could let people understand why we were doing what we were doing so as a conclusion the reflections that we have on this whole process of putting a course into an OER it's best to start small it's really familiar with we had several courses that we were doing some are more complex than others the one that was started the first one out was actually the one that the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies did themselves it's instructional skills workshop so it allowed people to go in and understand what it was like to teach online and that's apparently one of the most popular downloads so they find that a lot of people like that one and will take it and customize it for their own use have clear guidelines that was actually in answer to a question I asked to Mary what happens if you find somebody wants to put their course on but you're not sure if it's a course that should be on so Mary said what we do is we have really clear guidelines so people understand what it is we're looking for in a course and what we would like to put forward because not every course is appropriate and it does take time so the sharing across units we have to have it's not a small piece she said once they've got all the check-offs and everybody's okay with doing it it takes them about two days to go through the process of getting the course ready for opening and make sure you've got sufficient resources which is something we all struggle with our own thing is continuous improvement so we're continually trying to figure out what it is we need to do and how we need to change it so each time there's another reiteration we find out more things and better and understanding that some people will opt out so even though somebody has this fantastic course with lots of tools embedded in it and you know that students love it that individual might choose to say I don't want it so we have to be okay with that and one of the other critical pieces Mary mentioned in her video clip was that it's important to get buy in from senior management to do this our university is very small we have less than 2,000 FT and our student numbers are small our university is one where you can walk across campus in about 5 minutes we have a castle on it so it's very small so it's easy for us to get buy in we talk to people on a daily basis it might be different in other institutions and that is it, I believe that's a 20 minutes so oh 5, a couple of minutes yeah well, thank you oh yes the two clocks are saying different times I've been going by this one so thank you very much thank you Joe for sharing an insight into what sounds like a most interesting place and to explain some of the things that you're really addressing which I know are the heart of what everyone is tackling so colleagues if you can put your hand up if you have a question we'll get the mic to you but I think we'll go over to any online questions yet well just a minute if we can just ask you to wait for the mic because we're recording there's one here it's only a very short question Joe, it's Vicky McGarvey from Nottingham Trent University what's the name of the OER resource that you've created and how will we find it okay, so if you go if you type in Royal University OER it'll pop up, it's just embedded in it and this one's called the bridge to be calm I think they just call it the bridge but it's the bridge to be calm and is it going to be deposited in any repositories and how do you you just access it straight from there and if anyone has any questions whatsoever Mary Burgess and I have some business cards if you're interested I mean it might be useful if you put it in some repositories because then you'll get a few more they may have done that already, I'm the faculty side of it and she's the technical side of it so Mary probably has done all kinds of things with it but I'll definitely mention that to her okay, all right, thank you very much if you click on it you should come up here shall we have a look at it? sure we'll see if we can get it, any more questions just up there so we're just pulling it out hello there, Clive Young from UCL I'm just wondering what was the motivations for the academic staff who were involved in producing that and did that change over time so for the particular course or for the both for the particular course and really I kind of guess we can have long term plans for OER as well it's just an idea of changing perceptions for sure so from the actually it was mine so I was the academic that was primarily wanting to get involved in this project because of the challenges we were finding in the classroom when I was teaching with the BCOM programme there were a lot of team conflicts students not wanting to work together and students feeling marginalised so if you're in a classroom and you've got those challenges it's layered on top of all the instructional material you're trying to give to them especially when you teach with a high element of team in your assessment so up to 30% as I said so in order to try to minimise the after effects of it we were trying to put something in at the beginning so the motivation came from me wanting to try and instill something at the beginning not to have to go through the amount of time invested when I was actually trying to teach content so it's from that perspective from it kind of grew from there though that was well as I said it was 2005, 2006 and every year somebody else has got on board and done different things so it's now mainly run by the administration in the BCOM office they make sure that it's up and running and everybody's got incentives to keep going so okay that's very interesting I'm sure all of us are interested in sustainability Dominic has asked a question coming in from online and would like to know some of the reasons why people are I assume he means faculty and academic staff gave for opting out of the OER process I think the biggest opt out was just from that fact that people are looking at what you've got and that critical element of not wanting to put yourself out there so I don't know that we've had that many opt outs it's primarily as far as I know I only know of I believe one that was not confident about wanting to put themselves out so it doesn't mean that it reflected on their particular piece of the cost or anything it's just that their preference was to keep it to them tight till they were ready I guess to do it so hopefully we can work on that and get them more confident with it it was a secondary from Dominic online but he was actually saying is there a case for requiring cc licensing sorry cc licensing what is that creative commons there's so many acronyms that's a question for me I'm not sure if I'm qualified to ask that I don't know I'll have a go at it my own personal feeling is that people need to be ready to put their things out and if they're not I'm not sure that we should be mandating it but that's my personal piece I think that people may have a reason for may choose later to put it out and that's what I think is happening in this particular case so I'm not sure that I mandate creative commons okay well before we get into a debate on that I'll bring this to a close so thank you very much Joe it was really interesting insights and can we thank Joe by waving our creative commons life thank you very much