Anne-Marie Scott

The OpenETC is a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the British Columbia advanced education sector. The OpenETC provides free open source educational technology services to teachers and students at post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, Canada. Operating since 2016 via a unique cooperative-style model of “contributions, not contracts” inspired by the platform cooperative movement, the OpenETC offers more than services, but also provides a community space for advancing our flavor of “Free Range Open EdTech.” In this session we will discuss how the OpenETC uses open source software to encourage technological autonomy for both educators and students, and how working at the level of the whole province helps smooth out resourcing disparities between institutions, most especially during the pandemic. We will us examples from our community to illustrate how the community-based services and supports we offer support the development of digital literacies and skills among educators and students as well as the sharing of open educational resources, and how our use of open source software has proven to be a catalyst that sparks bigger conversations within the BC post-secondary system about the role of technology in teaching and learning. We will also reflect on the governance model that we use, and some of the challenges and opportunities that have presented themselves over the 7 years that we have been operating.

Other people: Clint Lalonde

A common complaint in higher education has been that departments would consider open source options when purchasing software, but nobody ever bids into the formal procurement processes that public sector bodies are obliged to run. This response makes clear a fundamental mis-conception about how to approach the acquisition of open source; a competitive procurement process is in most cases inappropriate because no product purchase is being made. Instead a different kind of commitment of time and resources is required to adopt open source, and to facilitate decision making about that, a different kind of evaluation process is also required. This talk will outline the kinds of evalution processes that should be used by higher education to acquire open source solutions, and how such processes can actively enhance commercial procurement practices if that is the eventual route taken. It will also cover what kinds of information open source projects should be providing to enable easy options evaluation and decision making.