Grant Potter, Brian Lamb, Tannis Morgan, Clint Lalonde, Anne-Marie Scott.
These materials are at: https://opened.ca/oeglobal19/
The OpenETC is a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing open tech and practices in British Columbia.
No contracts or agreements are required to join us, just a willingness to participate in:
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Controlling our own tools, environments, and data.
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Lowering barriers to participation on the open web.
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Providing sustainable infrastructure and reducing the risks of vendor pricing and change cycles.
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Providing a space for BC learners and educators to experience, experiment, and innovate with open educational practices.
More about us at https://opened.ca/about.
Platforms
Over 1000 students and educators using the following platforms.
https://apps.opened.ca (Sandstorm)
https://chat.opened.ca (Mattermost)
Supports 29 teams, including the OpenETC and BC WordPress communities of practice at: https://chat.opened.ca
Our Mattermost install features integration with the BigBlueButton open source web conferencing system. Start up sessions for any channel with a couple clicks.
https://opened.ca (WordPress)
Shared platform loaded with premium plugins and themes, open source goodies at https://opened.ca
Home website identity (and some very helpful early conversations) via the wonderful Bryan Mathers of Visual Thinkery.
From Alan Levine: SPLOTS! Simplest possible learning tools, and no account creation/data collection required.
From Tom Woodward: a Bionic Upgrade for user management, custom roles and permissions, “Mother Blogs“, a “playground cleanser”, Mapping Data, Timeline JS from blog posts, and Annotating Audio and more!
In practice:
Send in the clones! https://opened.ca/clone-zone/
An ePortfolio starter site with themes, configurations, embedded help documentation, and pedagogical prompts. Rather than “Hello World!”, it provides students with a running start.
And of course, students can make it their own:
We have on-boarded hundreds of student portfolios from partners at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and the University of Victoria without any co-op founders on site.
Arranged via contributions, not contracts.
KPU student Anthony Rajkovich has contributed a number of WordPress support tutorials and videos, including on username and password management, uploading artifacts to an ePortfolio, and managing privacy settings, and managing privacy on an OpenETC WP site.
A student-authored community deep map on community food resources…
…with a SPLOT-ty form-based authoring interface…
…can be shared so anyone can create their own map, for any topic, in any place:
With cloning, we can share functioning environments and specialized, ready to run collaborative learning tools the way we share OER.
OpenETC platforms are hosted on BCNet EduCloud, “a self-managed higher education cloud server service” in British Columbia. BC privacy law compliant, and we don’t need no stinking trackers.
Where next?
We’ve proven the need exists and (most of) the technologies.
Now we need to build out the community and build in long-term sustainability.
“More co-op, less co-opt” by Anne-Marie Scott, Grant Potter, Brian Lamb, Tannis Morgan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
