The delivery of open online learning has become a more common practice (or at least a more desired practice) in higher education in recent years. In this session, two diverse universities will share their lessons learned in delivering open learning. UBC has long embraced open learning projects through a robust WordPress and MediaWiki publishing framework that helped advance a broad range of open educational activities, including student produced OER and open courses. UBC’s embrace of both a self-maintained open infrastructure as well as emerging third party platforms is creating new potentials for open education at UBC. Meanwhile Thompson Rivers University (TRU) has an “Open Learning” division with a long history of providing open access post-secondary distance education (online and print) by offering continuous enrollment, flexible scheduling and minimal admission requirements, as well as extensive capacity for Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) and a well-established transfer credit system. It is working to enhance its capacity to support learning and public engagement via open platforms as well, via alignment with the Open Educational Resources university (OERu) and by working with UBC to adapt its MediaWiki and WordPress framework for its own needs.

This session will examine how institutions and instructors can provide open educational experiences and develop the required expertise, capacity and support systems. The co-facilitators of this session will identify sharable and extensible tools, approaches and means of cooperation that will allow educators and learners to shape their open learning experiences.