OE Global 2019

The Open Educational Technology Coop is a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the British Columbia post-secondary sector. No contracts or agreements are required to join us, just a willingness and ability to actively participate in our collective endeavor to: encourage technological autonomy and provide ways for students, faculty and institutions to own and control their own data, lower the barrier to participation on the open web for British Columbia faculty and students, provide a more sustainable edtech infrastructure to British Columbia higher education offering institutions more control over their teaching tools, and assist BC faculty in evaluating and making informed pedagogical decisions around open source teaching and learning applications. Open-source educational technologies are not often considered as viable institutional options in highered as advocates face challenges competing with commercial vendors responding to standard IT procurement practices. RFP processes typically favour commercial applications and limit open-source involvement in the educational technology space at most institutions. Open-source software relies on the development of communities of both developers and users in order to be successful. The success comes from sharing knowledge about how the software is constructed and can be utilized. The OpenETC pools expertise and resources to support shared open infrastructure. We promote inter-institutional collaboration and provide shared open source platforms enabling co-creation and sharing of open educational resources and approaches to open pedagogy.