Tag Archives: scholarly communication

Open Education Week 2022: March 7-11

Open Education Week 2022 is being held internationally from March 7-11. It is celebrated every year as a community-built forum to raise awareness and highlight innovative Open Education successes worldwide. It was first launched by Open Education Global in 2012.

OE Week gives practitioners, educators, and students the chance to learn more about open educational practices and be inspired by the amazing work that is being done by the community across the world.

What is Open Education?

According to a definition from Opensource.com, Open Education is a philosophy about how individuals should generate, distribute, and build on knowledge. Open education advocates believe that everyone around the globe should have access to excellent educational experiences and materials, and they strive to remove obstacles to that aim. High monetary costs, outdated or expired resources and legal restrictions that limit collaboration between students and educators are examples of such hurdles. A collection of different definitions of Open Education can be found here.

Which core concepts behind Open Education bring the idea to life?

  • Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching, and sometimes research resources that have been published under an open license (such as Creative Commons) or that are part of the public domain. No technological or copyright-related barriers should exist to freely reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute OERs (the 5Rs).
    While the roots of OER reach back further, the term was established during a UNESCO forum in 2002. To this day, UNESCO remains one of the most important contributors to the evolution of OER and has issued its Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, which is the world’s only international framework for establishing norms in this field. Promoting Open Education, especially OER, is also part of UNESCO’s efforts to meet the United Nations Sustainability Goals. Find the UNESCO definition for OER and detailed information on their commitment in that area here.

  • Open Pedagogy is a concept that aims to open up the entire teaching, learning, and study experience, not only through the use of OERs but also by challenging established methods of knowledge creation. By using dynamic, open, and innovative methods, students, hand-in-hand with instructors, liberate themselves from the role of passive consumers of lectured “chalk and talk” content and become an active part of the educational process, for example by creating a textbook together with their instructor over the course of a semester.
    It is important to note that the Open Education movement did not
    invent alternative pedagogical approaches but can draw on many groundbreakers in this area. What is new in this context are the chosen methods and the strong association with the Open philosophy.

What are Indigenous perspectives on Open Education? Which resources address the relationship between Indigenous ways of Teaching, Learning and Knowing and Open Education?

Indigenous ways of knowledge building and sharing can be fundamentally different from Western approaches. The desire to (re)open access to knowledge and education for all only emerges from a predicament created by a Western claim to education and educational resources as a potentially marketable good and means of gaining distinction and power, which may not necessarily be found in Indigenous practices around knowledge creation, retention, and sharing.

The white paper Community First: Open Practices and Indigenous Knowledge by Skylee-Storm Hogan and Krista McCracken offers a first perspective on the relationship between Open Education and Indigenous Knowing and emphasizes that this relationship needs to be reflected on more, as the Open Education movement gathers momentum around the world.

UBC hosted The 6R’s of Indigenous OER: Re-imagining OER to Honour Indigenous Knowledge and Sovereignty, an online talk about the relation of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and OER on March 10 as part of OE Week. Find the recording of that session here.

Pulling Together: A Guide for Curriculum Developers by Asma-na-hi Antoine, Rachel Mason, Roberta Mason, Sophia Palahicky, and Carmen Rodriguez de France is a companion on the Indigenization of curricula and other educational contexts, that was developed as a collaboration between Royal Roads University, University of Victoria, and Arrive Consulting. It is part of the Pulling Together series, a set of professional learning guides stemming from a project on the Indigenization of post-secondary institutions in B.C.
The series is available as OER in the BCcampus Open Textbook Collection, each in a variety of formats.

What role does Open Education play in the UVic community?

Awareness of and advocacy for Open Education is widespread among stakeholders on UVic Campus.

  • An overview of Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) is being provided by the Office of Scholarly Communications at Uvic Libraries. 
  • UVic awards OER grants, to foster the adoption, adaptation or creation of Open Educational Resources (OERs). The aim is to replace existing textbooks or other educational resources with OERs that will be useable not just at UVic, but other post-secondary institutions, bringing down prohibitive barriers like high cost along the way.
  • The University of Victoria Student’s Society (UVSS) is providing a template for an advocacy letter, ready to be sent out to professors and lecturers to inform them about the benefits of OER. Read more about the initiative here.

Where can resources around Open Education be found?

Events for Open Education Week

The OE Week website lists a large number of events being organized around the globe
Events hosted in BC, sometimes with a provincial focus, are being listed on the BC Campus website. Some archived events of note include:

This blogpost was created adapting material from the following sources, which are licensed under a Creative Commons license:

Love Data Week 2022: Feb 14-18

Love Data Week is an international celebration of all things data, scheduled annually in the week of Valentine’s day. Its aim is to engage community and increase awareness with events that highlight the prominence, value, and appropriate handling of data in our lives and research.

For Love Data Week 2022, libraries at SFU, UBC, UNBC, and UVic collaborated to offer a series of talks and workshops. All events will be hosted online via Zoom and registration is open to everyone. 

You can check out all of the Love Data Week events and workshops through the UBC Library Research Commons. All events are online and completely open.

This year’s keynote presentation is by Sonia Barbosa, the Manager of Data Curation for Harvard Dataverse. The presentation is titled Lessons learned: 20 years of data acquisition and management services  and will be held on Monday, February 14th from 10am-11am, You can register for this talk here.

New program provides mobile end-of-life support to people in poverty

September, 2019 | UVic News & UVic News

In 2 recent UVic News articles, Dr. Kelli Stajduhar has been recognized for her work in developing a Palliative Outreach Resource Team (PORT) in Victoria.

‘The Palliative Outreach Resource Team (PORT) is a collaboration of the University of Victoria, Island Health, Victoria Cool Aid and Victoria Hospice. PORT acts as a bridge between people with serious illness and their caregivers, palliative care, and other health and social support systems.

The program is built upon lessons learned from a three-year study led by UVic palliative care researcher Kelli Stajduhar, lead investigator of the Equity in Palliative Approaches to Care program with the Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health and the School of Nursing.’

PORT endeavors to fulfill the important need for respectful end-of-life care within vulnerable portions of the Victoria community whereby…

‘Mirroring similar models in Toronto and Calgary, people can self-refer or be referred by their caregivers to a palliative care nurse and a physician who manage the pain and symptoms related to life-limiting illness, support chosen family and caregivers, and provide grief and bereavement support.’

Dr. Stajduhar has published several open access papers that you can access via our institutional repository UVicSpace – you can read them now by clicking here and here.

The Copyright and Scholarly Communications office located in the UVic McPherson library wish PORT much success!

Creating a Sustainable Future Through Clean Energy

July 8, 2019 | UVic News

The UVic Copyright and Scholarly Communications office would like to congratulate Dr. Zuomin Dong on his recent UVicNews article that highlights his important work …

‘Dong’s research, which will reduce the environmental impact and costs of marine traffic, is funded in part by a million-dollar donation by the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation, in conjunction with Seaspan. That funding supports the team’s [UVic’s Clean Transportation Research Team] development of the enabling technology and integrated modelling tools to transition marine vessels to optimized hybrid natural-gas / electric and pure electric propulsion systems.’

We invite you to visit UVic’s institutional repository, UVicSpace to view his open access papers.

Congratulations to Dr. Dong and UVic’s Clean Transportation Research Team!

Expert Q&A on sexually transmitted infections in Canada and beyond

July 9, 2019 | UVic News

‘University of Victoria microbiologist Caroline Cameron … [is] Recognized internationally for her research on sexually transmitted infections, the Cameron Lab is one of only a few labs in the world, and the only lab in Canada, that is working to understand the basic science of the pathogen that causes syphilis, Treponema pallidum.

Recently, Cameron was recognized with a LifeSciences BC award for her work successfully advancing health outcomes in BC, while at the global stage, Cameron has been recognized by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with a MERIT Award celebrating an outstanding record of achievement and acknowledging the promise of her research.’

Please follow the UVicNews link above to read the full Q&A session with Caroline Cameron and visit our institutional repository to read some of Caroline Cameron’s important open access (OA) articles in UVicSpace.

Google Features UVic Project in Latest Launch

August 9, 2019 | UVic News

‘…a new Google project is highlighting an initiative led by UVic anthropologist Brian Thom and Indigenous languages teacher yutustanaat Mandy Jones (Snuneymuxw First Nation).

The “Celebrating Indigenous languages” Google Earth Voyager project is a curated set of high-quality stories published through Google Earth. It is available in 10 languages internationally and encompasses 55 Indigenous languages in 27 countries from Australia, India, Ecuador and Chile to Cameroon, Pakistan, Turkey and Finland.

And, thanks to yutustanaat, the new tool includes words, phrases, a proverb and songs in the Hul’q’umi’num’ language, as spoken by yutustanaat (pronounced “Yah-TUS-tuh-naught”).’

The Copyright and Scholarly Communications Office encourage you to explore this dynamic resource and to further read more of Brian Thom’s important work by visiting UVic’s institutional repository, UVicSpace.

Forest Corridors Vital for Wildlife

July 29, 2019 | UVic News

Frances Stewart and Jason Fisher both adjunct assistant professors at UVic’s the School of Environmental Studies have recently published an exciting paper that..

…shows how the movements of one small mammal – the weasel-like fisher – through natural forested corridors underlines the importance of these safe pathways and points to implications for many other forest animals across the country such as the wolverine, moose, lynx and hare.

Please visit Stewart & Fisher‘s respective UVicSpace pages to read more about their valuable research.

The Human Benefits of Marine Protected Areas

June 11, 2019 | UVic News

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are well known for protecting biodiversity, but their effects on people who use the oceans are debated. Now a new review—led by University of Victoria marine conservation scientist Natalie Ban and 12 co-authors—illustrates that these protected areas can also support human well-being.

The University of Victoria’s institutional repository, UVicSpace contains over half a dozen articles published by Natalie Ban, Assistant Professor with UVic’s School of Environmental Studies. To explore and read her important works in UVicSpace please follow the link here.