If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Although sharing and collaboration are among the main affordances of open licensing, open education projects in North America are still mainly supported and driven by individual organizations or institutions. While working within a single organization can permit the agile development and management of open education projects, at BCcampus we believe that an innovative and sustainable open education movement requires deliberate and active collaborations across institutions and organizations, particularly within academic disciplines. In this presentation we will showcase three examples of our efforts to foster a collaborative model for the development of open educational resources (OER). The first example involves the creation of Communities of Open Education Practitioners (COEPs) for several disciplines. Among other things, these COEPs employ the open source annotation tool Hypothes.is atop the open textbooks of their discipline to flag errors, highlight passages that require revision, and to share pedagogical resources. The second example involves a collaborative sprint model wherein a small number of practitioners are brought together for a short span of time to develop specific OER or ancillary resources. The third example involves a collaborative model of OER development (featuring co-development, peer-review, and reuse) for Canada’s first three “Zed Creds,” degree programs that carry zero textbook costs thanks to the adoption of OER. In this presentation we will share the strategies we have deployed and lessons we have learned for fostering and supporting successful collaborative OER projects.
