I'm Don Gorges in Toronto with a career in Visual Communications Creative Services i.e. Open Design Studio-Labs and self-directed Research in Development of a Personal Learning API.

Online Personal Information via my LinkedIn Profile: _ https://www.linkedin.com/in...

My WordPress Blog _ https://dongorges.wordpress...

I have some experience reviewing educational resources available in print and online and am familiar with BCcampus online Textbooks.

One thing I expect to learn more about in this course is what Faculty think is important regarding the educational resources their Students' use.

Hello Don, Welcome! We're happy that you can join us and that you have some experience with our project.

Welcome, Don. Hope the month is a fruitful one for you.

Hello everyone. I'm Heather Ross and I work as an Instructional Design Specialist in the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Saskatchewan. A big part of my position is to be the lead for our unit on all things open including consulting on small and large open initiatives at the U of S, offering workshops around the topic and even teaching a large open course on learning technologies that just launched today.

Recently we launched a Website to act as a hub for all things open at the U of S, which can be found here - http://www.usask.ca/open/

My blog can be found here - http://www.mctoonish.com/blog/

I'm @mctoonish on Twitter.

I'm hoping, through this working to accomplish two things - 1) connect with others working on advancing open in general in higher education and 2) gain some ideas for increasing the adoption of open textbooks at our university.

Hi Heather, Welcome. Glad you can join us. It sounds like some exciting things are happening at U of S. Thanks for the links and have fun.

Hello!

I'm Krista. I'm an instructional designer with the Centre for Teaching, Learning & Innovation at the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC). I'm also a MEd student in Technology & Learning Design at Simon Fraser University.

My twitter is: @contentkrista (https://twitter.com/content...

We're working on lots of open projects at JIBC - one that I worked on recently was an open English100 textbook. You can check out what we're doing here: http://teltjibc.wordpress.com

In addition to connecting with some of you, I'm looking forward to learning more about CC licenses (looking forward to next week, Paul!) and evaluating/choosing open textbooks.

Hi Krista,
Very nice to meet you! I'd love to see your English 100
open textbook because I teach English at Kwantlen and have been adapting
various OER and open texts into an open, online writing text for my own
ENGL 1100. Could you share a link to the open textbook you created?
Thanks,
Sheila

Hi Krista and Sheila, Welcome. We're so happy you can both can join us for this workshop. I'm glad to see that you're sharing information with each other.

Sheila,
Our OER Composition I text is still in pilot phase, but here's a link to the Saylor text with which we started our work: http://www.saylor.org/site/...
Our ultimate result was something much different, but I'll give you the link as soon as we have it posted. I'm afraid one issue our college is having with OERs is that we don't have a designated public space for them. I'd love to know where most folks post the OERs created by departments (as opposed to those created individually and put on an instructor's homepage).

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks--I'm excited to see the link.

I used

http://2012books.lardbucket...

and

http://2012books.lardbucket...

for much of my text, but I also supplemented with other OER--the OWL at Purdue has some great open access videos, and the KPU library has some nice tutorials that I included.

Very nice to meet you, Jennifer!

Sheila

Hi Jennifer, Welcome to our workshop. What college are you from?

Hi Sheila,

KPU alum here (love that school)! It still needs to go out for some final edits, but I'd be happy to share. I'll shoot you an email this afternoon (I see you in the directory) with the PDF.

Cheers,
Krista

Hi Krista,
Thanks so much!
Sheila
PS Maybe you were in one of my classes--haha!

I'm Sally Wilson, the Web Services Librarian at Ryerson University in Toronto. My web presence consists of a wide range of accounts, most of which were set up as experiments. The ones I use most often for work and learning are my Twitter account, @swilson416, my Google Plus account, and my blog - http://vibrantoutlook.wordp...

My experience with open education has been through participation in a couple of online courses/cMoocs, Headless DS106 and ETMOOC and through some work that I did while on a study leave. My study leave focused on ebook creation and "hacking" books in the public domain and how this could be used as a pedagogical tool. I have also created a couple of versions of Jason Griffey's LibraryBox (http://librarybox.us), a self-contained wireless network that allows one to distribute files (could be public domain items or OER) in areas that lack Internet connectivity.

In this course I would like to learn more about what OER are available and how they are being used in higher education institutions in Canada. Although I don't teach courses myself, I would like to be a resource person for others in my institution who might be considering using or creating open textbooks and I would like to have a better idea of the challenges that might arise.

Hi all,

I'm Sheila Hancock, a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in BC. I'm also a student in Lancaster University's (UK) PhD, e-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning programme and about to embark on the dissertation stage. The topic of my thesis will be open textbooks (I say "will be" because I'm currently working on the initial proposal).

Last semester, I took the leap and adapted various OER and open textbooks into an open, online writing text for my first-year English students. They loved it!

I have a few blogs, but the most relevant one is probably this one:

https://learningandtechnolo...

The blog is a product of our departmental learning and technology committee, but I'm the only one who's every posted on it!

Because of my upcoming research, in this course, I'm hoping to learn everything there is to know about open textbooks!

Nice to meet you all!

Sheila

Hi,

Hi,

I'm Richard Zach. I teach philosophy at the University of Calgary, and am working with some colleagues on an open textbook for our advanced logic courses. It uses LaTeX and git, and can be found at http://openlogicproject.org/. I though this would be useful to find out what others are doing in OER-land and what to watch out for to make the text as easily adoptable as possible. And I'm @rrrichardzach on Twitter.

Welcome Richard! Happy that Alberta is represented for the workshop. That's great news about the open textbook you and colleagues are working on.

Hi, I'm Gwen Bird, Dean of Libraries at SFU. Interested in how libraries can be involved in promoting OER and open textbooks. My related experience in this space is with Open Access to scholarly resources and the kind of support academic libraries are providing on that side. Interested in seeing how to pivot that to support OER. @BirdGwen on twitter.

Hello Gwen, Welcome and thanks for joining the workshop. Your experience with open access to scholarly resources will be very valuable to our participants.

Hey everyone. I'm Robin DeRosa, Professor of English and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies here at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire (US). I am an early Americanist by training, but I have committed the next few years of my scholarly life to thinking about open access (with a particular interest in open pedagogy and reforming academic publishing). You can check out my blog at https://actualham.wordpress... or follow me on Twitter at @actualham. I'm interested in learning more about how to start an OER movement on my campus, and how to link it to a broader educational revolution related to open access.

Hi Robin, Welcome! We do alot of work with our American colleagues so it's great to have you. I hope our workshop helps you with your commitment to open.

Thanks! Glad to be working with you all!

Glad to see another English person (though I'm British literature). I know we've encountered some special issues in creating OERs because we need those actual pieces of literature that are often owned by others. I'm excited to hear what sorts of solutions you all may be using outside of putting things on reserve in libraries.

Hi Jennifer,

Have you seen this one: http://opentextbc.ca/englis...

If I'm assigned a survey course on Victorian and Modern Lit. next year, I'm going to use it!

Sheila

Thank you for the link. I'm going to investigate it further & share it with our eCore folks in GA.

Excellent! Let me know if you have questions about that one. I worked directly with the author in the creation.

Hello folks!

I'm the Director of eLearning and Instructional Design at Everett Community College in WA state. My Twitter handle is @AlysonIndrunas and I blog at http://spokeandhub.wordpres...

I'll admit I'm somewhat experienced with Open Education, and I'm here to gain information on how to support my Alternative Textbook Committee. Ideally my faculty would take this course, but they are going to busy with the requirements of our grant. My department provides a small stipend for course development and implementation. This is our second committee that I have co-chaired, and I've used OER as a teacher for over four years now. Prior to becoming the Director of eLearning, I taught English composition. I also teach various faculty development workshops when I'm fortunate enough to be asked to do so.

I am hoping to learn better ways to support faculty in what I see as student-centered faculty-driven professional development. We are fully grassroots, so the more I can learn from and share with others, the better the experience will be with faculty who trust me to do this work. Plus, how can I resist OER teachings from Super, Natural British Columbia?

Welcome Alyson. We're excited to learn from your experience and welcome you (remotely) to Beautiful British Columbia.

Just a reminder to everyone posting their intro's here: to earn the badge, you need to post the intro, then click the badge icon to claim your badge. 2 step process - post intro, then claim badge. When you are asked for a url to submit, use the url for this page of the course if you have posted your intro below.

Hi, my name is Caroline Power. I am a library technician at Cape Breton University Library @CBU_library My Twitter account is @CarolinePower5
My experience of Open Education is through taking my Library and Information Technology course through NSCC and from trying to navigate students through their search for information. I am hoping that this course will help to improve my skills.

Welcome Caroline. We're glad to have a representative from the Maritimes join us.

I'm Heather Blicher, the librarian at Northern VA Community College's Extended Learning Institute (ELI). Since ELI's students are all online, one of my main focuses is to be faculty's go-to resource for OER and ultimately to find and encourage use of open access textbooks. I'm seeking to gain a more in-depth perspective on the topic from the course content and fellow participants. LinkedIn profile: heatherblicher

Hi Heather. It's great to have your participation all the way from Virginia. Welcome.

Hi Heather,
I have some great colleagues in Virginia that I work with in the Two Year College English Association. I'm excited to hear more about what Tidewater has been doing with their Z-degree program.

Hi, my name is Ross Mckerlich and I am an education technologist, program administrator and ed tech researcher at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia. I see open textbooks as a way of minimizing barriers to learning without sacrificing quality. For me, the question of "Why would you use an open textbook?" is a no brainer. Instead it should be "Why would'nt you?". I am looking forward to a time when adopting open textbooks is the norm - not the exception.

Hi Ross and welcome. You made a very good point re open textbooks. Do you have a blog or website you'd like to share, or a Twitter hashtag?

Excellent point, Ross. Having the flexibility of updating the contact as a faculty member and the fact that students save money? It really is a no brainer.

Hello Everyone,
I thought I posted yesterday, but it's not showing so I'm going again (ignore me if it's a repeat).

I teach Composition and World Literature at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta, GA. I also serve as our "campus champion" for the Affordable Learning GA Committee (check us out at affordablelearninggeorgia.org). The University System of GA has made making low or no cost textbooks a priority so it's a really great time to be learning more about this. At our December "Future of the Textbook Symposium" I had a chance to hear some of the same OER gurus who I see are going to be part of this course - Cable Green, David Wiley, and David Ernst. I'm looking forward to learning more about how I can convince my colleagues to join the OER movement. As an access institution, it just falls in line so seamlessly with our mission, that it seems like a no-brainer.

I can be found online at http://sites.gpc.edu/jduncan/ and I'm on the Google+ community for this course as jennifer.duncan.gpc@gmail.com

Hi Jennifer, We're glad that you can join us and represent the great state of Georgia. It's wonderful to hear that the GA university system is making low/no cost textbooks a priority. Open textbooks fit in perfectly with this mandate.

Hi,

Hello Sally! How's the weather in TO?
Leva

Hi Everyone,
I'm Nokuthula Mdlalose. I am a librarian at Mangosuthu University of Technology in Durban, South Africa. I attend to information needs of students and staff in the Faculty of Management Sciences. Find me: @mdlalosecarol or n0k2lamdlalose@gmail.com. I have some experience with MOOC, I was registered with Stanford University and I enjoyed the journey very much. In fact it is how I got to know about this course. I wish to introduce instructors in my institution to open textbooks, but I need to get enough information first.

Welcome, Nokuthula. It's great to have South Africa represented at this workshop. We hope you learn alot and make many valuable connections.

I am Don McCahill, the sole Instructional Designer at Lambton College in Sarnia, Ontario. Ontario is way behind in OER compared to BC and Alberta, and I have made it my goal to get things moving here: not to outdo BCCampus and the coming Alberta group, but to collaborate with them to see all Canadian students benefiting from free texts. I have a great deal of experience with fully online courses and hybrid courses, and Lambton is probably the Ontario leader in mobile learning, with most programs requiring each student come in with an iPad or a computer. Anyone using Scott McLean's "Writing for Success" may want to contact me. I have extracted all the exercises from that nice English composition text, and have them in a 100 page PDF file as a workbook. (This will be posted to Merlot, and offered to Saylor once our English department finalizes things this summer).

My goal is to save our students $100,000 in textbook costs in the coming school year, and eventually $1,000,000 a year before I retire. I can be contacted at donald.mccahill@lambtoncollege.ca.

Hello Don. We're happy to have another Canadian colleague join us. Your goal is very admirable. Keep us apprised about your progress.

Hey Don,
I'd love to see that exercise book. I've used parts of McLean's text in my open, online text. Do you have it in pdf form? Alternatively, I can wait until the summer and access it on Merlot.
Sheila

I have it in PDF and InDesign formats. Let me know how to get it to you.

Hi Don,
I'm at sheila.hancock@kwantlen.ca
Thanks!
Sheila