Memorial is celebrating Open Education Week 2016, an annual global event to raise awareness about the open education movement and promote the use of free and open educational resources for teaching and learning.
Many faculty and staff at Memorial, some of whom are featured below, already know the value of open educational resources and use them in their teaching practice, or advocate for their use.
1/ Dr. Jane Costello, DELTS
A senior instructional designer with DELTS, Dr. Costello led the development of stor, Memorial's repository for learning objects. The objects in stor are free and open resources that can be used or repurposed by faculty, staff and students for teaching and learning. Learn more by visiting stor.mun.ca.
2/ Dr. David Tulett, Faculty of Business Administration
Dr. Tulett is the author of a 500-page course manual that he provides to students for free in Business 2400: Decision Modelling. On March 9, Dr. Tulett provided a webcast presentation about his process for creating the document, the continuous improvement made since its initial creation in 2011, and the reasons for his recent move to make it open. The webcast will soon be made available on www.open.mun.ca.
3/ Dr. Chris Rowley, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science
Dr. Rowley has an open materials component in two of his chemistry courses, where students contribute to a wiki book for each course. A wiki book allows his students to populate content as a group throughout the duration of the course, providing the opportunity to apply what they have learned.
4/ Dr. Glyn George, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science
Dr. George makes course content openly available on his website, including lecture notes, problems/solutions and past examinations. Instead of spending class time copying notes and example questions, his students can easily access course material online so that class time can be better spent listening and thinking about solutions.
5/ Dr. Patrick Gamsby, Queen Elizabeth II Library
Dr. Gamsby is an advocate for open educational resources, and recently joined Memorial University as the scholarly communications librarian. In this role, he supports all things open access, including the Open Access Fund, the Electronic Journal Publishing Platform, the Research Repository, and the Digital Archives Initiative.
6/ Dr. David Behm, School of Human Kinetics and Recreation
Dr. Behm uses a variety of open educational resources in his teaching, including a YouTube video of a 2014 TEDx talk he gave at an independently organized event in St. John's. The talk is titled Stretching the Way We Think About Athletes.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research resources that can be freely used and repurposed by others, and can include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
For more information about Open Education Week events, or how Memorial supports open education and open access, visit www.open.mun.ca.
