 Yeah, so my name is Arthur Gilgrain. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Geography here at UBC. And I basically have spent a year here working on open education resources, enhancing the teaching of learning in the department. I'm also a faculty fellow for BC Campus, further open education resources program, and a permanent faculty member at Okadawn College where I teach geography and GI science, geographic information science. Perfect. So based off of the questions that we've talked about, can you talk about your experience in the BC Campus open education faculty fellow? Yeah, so where do you want me to begin? Do you want me to start? Why I'm in open education? Yeah. Okay, so when I started teaching in 2010, my first semester, I was finishing a course in Introduction to Human Geography. And I noticed there was four of my students in the back of the class taking pictures. I thought, why would they stay after class and do selfies? So I walked to the back of the class and it turned out they were taking pictures of the actual textbook. And it was the first time I encountered that. So the students, I said, why are you taking these pictures? And they said, well, we collectively bought a textbook and one of us gets it every week. And the other ones take pictures with their phone and read it off their phones. So that was sort of a, it was the canary in the coal mine for me in terms of open education resources and proprietary resources and how they interacted. So from that point on, as a young teacher, I was trying to identify open education resources for teaching. At that time it was really hard to find anything in geography. It really struggled. And it was only in 2014 that BC Campus under its mandate that it had for a couple of years to build out open education resources, in particular textbooks for the top 40 top subjects in education, university education here. It was only then that they started to work on a geography open textbook. So as soon as they sent out a call for geography, I signed up. I was the first person to sign up. I got some other geography post-doctoral people and doctoral students and professors on the team. And we did what was called a book sprint, which is a week long, locking us in to a room and writing together. And that was my first experience actually, authoring an open textbook, creating a truly open education resource. That book came out, I think, about three months after our writing session. It is now on the BC Campus open textbook website, which has, I believe, about 140 different textbooks for different subjects offered here in British Columbia. After that, I fell into the open education movement and I decided I wanted to make it part of my professional identity and my career. So, and my pedagogy, clearly. So BC Campus, I believe, is at the cutting edge of open education resources in terms of developing them and thinking about them. Especially here in British Columbia, but I think also within the international context. They've hosted the Open Education Conference just this last year, 2015, and they're continuing to do amazing stuff. So when they had a call from the faculty fellows, which is basically we're charged with working on publicizing, promoting adoption and adaptation of open textbooks and helping them think through a strategy for open education resources. When they published that call, again, was the first person to apply broadly. I was really excited to see it. So then being on the cutting edge of open education resources was very attractive to me because I do believe open education resources are on the cutting edge of responsible pedagogy, really. So I feel like my work with them is encouraging responsible pedagogy. It's encouraging adoption of open education principles and resources. And, you know, that's so far been my experience. They're in neighbors in a good way. Sorry? What do you mean responsible pedagogy? I mean, so far since they've started their program, BC Campus Open Textbooks are estimated to have saved students between $1.1 and $1.4 million. And the conservative estimate is $100 textbook per student, so that's the $1.1 million. The $1.4 million is actually a reference to what professors and students report is the true cost of the book. So it goes back to the first story I told about the students in my classroom. If students can't afford resources, if they can't afford textbooks and it's hindering their learning, there's now survey results that show that students in parts of the United States and Canada may not take certain courses because they can't afford the textbook. So if textbooks and other proprietary resources are hindering learning, then we're not being responsible on how we choose the textbooks and how we choose what students should read and how we make them really the principal agent problem. The professor chooses the book, the student has to buy it. So how do we be responsible at our pedagogy and our approach to choosing textbooks, choosing resources and delivering them? Does that make sense? Perfect. And so going off of that, can you talk maybe about some of the work that you've been doing around open at UBC and if you can mention the websites? Yeah, great. So I was hired on here in June of 2015 to work with Loc Brown and Derek Turner as the other postdoc. Loc Brown is our principal for the fund. The fund is underneath the flexible learning project. But this flexible learning project is actually emphasizing curriculum enhancement within the environment sustainability program in the Department of Geography. Loc came up before we were even on board, before I was on board, before Derek was on board. He came up with several guiding principles for what he thought flexible learning and what an environment sustainability program should look like. One of those was open education resources. Whenever possible, we should be emphasizing adoption, adaptation, creation and overall use of open education resources. So my big contribution to this project is basically teaching, I think, faculty members, helping other postdocs, young PhD students who are going to be professors, understand how to access open education resources. On top of that, I think we're sort of on the front end of introducing open education to geography. And what do I mean by that? For me, open education is a movement. And as part of that movement, you have open science, you have open pedagogy, you have open, what's that, open education resources, right? So there's different components to open education. And as we bring that into geography, we're confronting not only some of the disciplinary ideas around what we should be doing, but also some really giant opportunities for what we can do. So one of the things I've been working on as a postdoctoral fellow here at UBC is introducing free and open source software for GIS, particularly quantum GIS as a possible learning tool within geographic information science. So we've got two research assistants and myself who've basically been rewriting a training manual using BC-specific cases so that people can learn open source software. And these training modules we've built, which will be also a training manual and hopefully one day a textbook, these are free and open to the world and they'll be presented on our department website. So that brings me to two websites that I've also been closely involved with developing. The first is called open.grwc.ca. And this is envisioned by our project team as an archive of open education resources. So what we've done is, what I just mentioned, the quantum GIS modules will be there. We're also working with Google Cardboard and Photospheres, how to do technology-assisted field trips. That'll be there. We've developed a plugin for WordPress called FieldPress, which is again an open resource. That'll be hosted there, this sort of technical background to it, installation of that. But then it'll be part of the WordPress universe of plugins that anyone can use. So all of these things are for teaching and we want to share those as part of our mandate. The second website I've been closely involved with building out is called environment.grwc.ca. And this second website also, I believe, is integral to the principles of open education and goes back to what our principal investigator, Loc Brown, sort of outlined as principles for our project. And one of those was authentic learning. So that's very important to me. I grew up in a service learning environment and I believe service learning and authentic learning really are a great marriage. But authentic learning for us means that students don't just write papers that end up being read by a TA or by a professor. It can be extended to community-based research, service learning, all sorts of other things. But if we just start from the basic principle, student assignments should be made to benefit the large public. It not only gives a benefit to the student because it allows them to show their expertise, it also increases their learning and allows them to see how interaction with the world can either provide a new venue for their project, their skills, or it can provide feedback that they can improve on the actual products that they're making. So environment.grwc.ca is supposed to host student-only creations. And right now, some of the early stuff we put on there are case studies of what we call wicked environmental problems. So which environmental problems are environmental challenges that have their heart to solve? So we have, I think, 40 or so different case studies. And that's sort of being presented as an encyclopedic resource for anyone who wants to teach about wicked environmental problems. We'll also have student-generated field trips. So students are learning how to make field trips using Google Photosphere and Google Cardboard. And we'll also have additional products as we go on through the semester. So we're hoping that both of these will be released in February and that these will all be open resources. Perfect. And so based on your experience at BC Campus and your experience here at UBC and with open and large, could you talk about some of the other opportunities that you see that exist for open practice within geography? Yeah, so that's a good question. I think geographers have the benefit of integrating human and environment. And also having this amazing geographic information science that helps us bridge issues in the human and environment world. So we also have a long tradition of getting in the field. A geographer who's not in the field often has difficulty with their own professional identity, right? So it's part of our discipline, it's part of our professional identity to go out and get dirty. Whether that means doing interviews or whether that means digging holes and taking samples and bringing those back for analysis. So in terms of open, I think there's a lot that we can do in terms of open pedagogy. We do have a large amount of topics we cover and by having this large amount of topics we cover, we can be very flexible in the type of assignments that we work with students to assess their learning. We can also be flexible about how we get out in the field. So I believe open pedagogy can play a big role in our discipline. It can actually help us reinvent some of the ways that we're teaching. And I believe we can open up a discussion with the students so that the students are really no longer students, so that we sort of overcome this student-teacher divide. And we understand that everyone in the relationship is a learner. The teacher and the student are both learners and we can explore the field of geography in that respect. I'm not sure that that totally gets at your question, but I think another avenue besides open pedagogy is the open science aspect. So open science again is, I believe, one of the pillars of open education. And one of the projects we've done here in the department in regards to open science is in our JOB 270, which is the Interjunction to Geographic Information Science. We had them do a project on the agricultural land, which is sort of British Columbia. Basically, we looked at what was being given as the estimate of the number of hectares within the agricultural land reserve. And we saw that there were roads and other types of buildings and water bodies and other things that were included and covered a substantial amount of the land that was estimated as the agricultural land reserve. So our students, as a group, it was a course of nearly, I think it's around 100 students, broke up the agricultural land reserve into 25 different subsections and they all went and they analyzed the subsections of the ALR to look at how much land in the ALR, the agricultural land reserve, is actually being used or can be used for agriculture. And we're still in the process of tabulating the results of that student work. But once we have come up with a new estimate, we hope that this student work will be able to inform public debate about the agricultural land reserve and actually give a better idea of how much land we have within the province in the ALR. So I think that's the open science aspect. We've opened up a research project. Our results and our process will be open to the public. And I think a lot of geography would benefit from that. I think it's something we can adopt right away. Perfect. And you've talked, hold on. Yeah. And like at times to record every 20 minutes and then it starts again. I'll make sure before you start answering the question. I'm going to cut you off. So you've talked a lot about the benefits or the advantages of open education for students. Can you talk from an instructor perspective? What are some of the advantages of open practice? Yeah, for sure. That's a great question. I think most of the open education resources literature has been focused on the economic benefits for students. And I don't think there's any question that open education resources do have clear economic benefits. I think one part of the equation that hasn't been focused on enough yet. And what I want to focus on at BC campus is the idea that adopting open education resources changes pedagogy. It changes the way that we teach. How does it change the way that we teach? When we adopt open education resources, we're no longer relying on a canonical text. We're no longer relying on the textbook that's been approved and reiterated through nine editions with minor so-called improvements. We are now relying on a community of people who are collaboratively editing a text. So it's the difference between, say, Wikipedia and the quality of some of the articles in there, which is very high. And, say, it's like the Wikipedia Britannica, where you may not have as many articles and they've been through a vetting process which constrains how much information can be given for specific subject areas. So as a professor, I enjoy teaching as part of a team. And by adopting open education resources, you're becoming part of a team. You're part of a community. You're collaboratively teaching now. Another advantage is you can actually take the text and modify it to your teaching style. So I mentioned earlier, I grew up in the service learning tradition. That's how I learned. So any text that I adopt for my courses, I'd like to build in service learning components and have students be able to go out and do stuff, you know, in the community, come back and as part of our course text have reflective questions, right? So the text is tailored to me. I'm not no longer tailoring my courses to the text, if that makes sense. And I think that is true academic freedom. I believe that's academic freedom. I should say point there. Perfect. I think I have just a couple more questions. And this one definitely overlaps with your answer that the answer you just gave. But if you could just elaborate a bit more on sort of the importance of open education. Sure. So my elaboration, so cut. So open education to me, I mentioned earlier, is a movement. And one of the things I learned at BC Campus was how this movement has grown. And BC Campus, people that I work with, Amanda Kluge, Clint LaLa, Lori, Mary, there's so many people there who are doing amazing work and they've been at the cutting edge of this. So they say, you know, okay, they went to conferences five years ago and they said the University of Minnesota had a project that was helping five to eight different campuses across the country think about adopting open textbooks. Five years later, this same group from Minnesota comes back to a conference here in BC and they've got 29 universities or educational institutions that are helping adopt open textbooks across the country in the United States. So yeah, for me, I think it's a growing movement. So I think what I think about its importance has to do with faculty, our benefits to faculty, the benefits to students, the institutional benefits. A lot of institutes can actually have more of a collective memory of what was taught. They can benefit on book prices and so on. But I believe, beyond what I believe is important about open education, there's a wider social recognition that open education is a movement. It's getting bigger. And if we can be trained within open education principles, we may have a more open society. So open education links to open data, it links to open society. It links to a better democracy. It links to, I think, a better world. Perfect. And I think part of this idea of open education being a movement intrinsically implies that there is a shift happening in education as a whole. Can you talk about what you see education in the future looking like? Yeah, I get on my crystal ball. I'm not sure I'm one that I can predict what education in the future looks like, but I can tell you what I hope it looks like. And I hope it looks like this movement will continue. I hope it looks like professors working together to write textbooks that meet their individual teaching styles, that meet the learner's individual demands, and that are free. I think it's part of our job. It's part of a responsible pedagogy to do that. I do believe that education in the future, some people are afraid that everything will be online, but I know I just finished that training course. People want to talk to each other. They want to see each other. Everyone has a different learning style. Some people may be at home accessing the literature and only come in for occasional discussions, but it's part of the conversation that happens face to face, which I think is the vibrancy of education academia. And that goes all the way back to radical pedagogy and polyphery. So for me, the education of the future will probably still involve human beings together in a similar space, but I hope it involves them using open education resources. And I don't think that's as big a shift as it may sound like it is. Once people can understand the licensing and the incredible benefits that open education resources provide, I think a lot of people will come up with.