Dreams of Open Education Health and
Nutrition Resources
• a few cautious steps from
the Faculty of Land and
Food Systems at UBC
Cyprien Lomas
Director, Learning Centre
Faculty of Land and Food Systems

University of British Columbia
• 40K students,
• 11 schools & faculties
• have centralised /
decentralised support
• central units pushing a
simple solution
(WebCT)

more about UBC...
• centralised - decentralised
collaboration
• WebCT campus
• Office of Learning
Technologies is the owner
(and champion) of WebCT

UBC is the birthplace of WebCT
• WebCT used for everything...
• \"just webCT it\"
• recently switched over to Vista

UBC is the birthplace of WebCT
• WebCT used for everything...
• \"just webCT it\"
• recently switched over to Vista

The Faculty Mindset
• have WebCT for free...
• perceived as ‘up to date’
to be using WebCT
• anything else would take
more effort - therefore http://blogs.landfood.ubc.ca/ubcfarm/
not likely

Faculty use the following WebCT tools
• course content
(powerpoints / PDFs)
• discussion board
• gradebook
• quizzes

Faculty of Land & Food Systems
• running Sakai & Moodle servers (quietly)
• looking for people to test them out

Faculty of Land & Food Systems
• shotgun strategy to
changing culture
• Creative Commons
considerations
• intellectual
property

Faculty of Land & Food Systems
• would talk about ‘open’
only with very close,
trusted colleagues
• used with Permission from Bjorn Thomson

Food and Nutrition
• nutrition in Vietnam
• what are the
challenges?
• approached to talk
about potential

Came offering help
• instructors open to sharing
resources.. but
• don’t have the vocabulary
for what ‘open’ means
http://internationalnutrition.landfood.ubc.ca/

started partnership
• create site to share
resources
• Vista wouldn’t work :)
• ended up going with
Drupal

put together a framework
• snuck in the word ‘open’
• prof asked colleagues to
contribute materials

building the site...
• course content was
powerpoint & WebCT
• scrutinised ownership of
material in lecture slides

Phased this into a multi year plan.
• suspect that the
appropriate pace
is closer to five
years

Conclusions
• very willing faculty
• need to work on copyright
awareness
• much more work needed-
mostly cultural http://www.landfood.ubc.ca

Next steps
• holding the ‘open education’
conference in August 2009
•

• initiatives elsewhere in British Columbia

• thanks!
• Cyprien Lomas
• cyprien@gmail.com
creative commons licensed flickr photo by tyfn