Creating Policy for OER in Canada

INTRO MUSIC

HOST
Welcome to our podcast discussing the creation of supportive policies for open educational resources in Canada and the Canadian provinces.
Canada is unique in its lack of a central, federal authority over education. Instead, we live in a complex system of provincial jurisdictions. 
In this podcast, we ask how the structure of our education system affects our options when it comes to the use of open educational resources, and what has to change if we want to take full advantage of the benefits of OER and the transformation they could bring to teaching and learning.
Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, provides us with an overview of Canada’s complex education system.


RORY McGREAL
In Canada, we have thirteen different educational systems. In education, Canadian provinces have more independence than European states. In Europe, there are many educational initiatives uh at the European Union level. In Canada, the federal government is prohibited by our constitution from interfering with education. And so we have curriculum departments in every province. Uh Not only that, in many provinces, we have curriculum departments; separate Catholic and public curriculum departments, and in some provinces we also have French curriculum and English language, so English and French language curriculum departments that are different. And even in some provinces, you even have English Catholic, French Catholic, English public and French public, and so it becomes quite a mess as far as uh dealing with curriculum because each one develops their own and standardizes their own, their own curriculum. So this is problematic.


HOST
With such a complex system, any effort to transform curriculum policy on a broad scale will face challenges. McGreal describes the challenges in curriculum departments selecting materials and how their views of OER may influence their decisions.


RORY McGREAL
Another problem about that is that these central departments order the textbooks, or in some cases, they decide which textbooks you can order and give you a limited choice. And it’s always with commercial publishers. And these publishers have very close relationships with our curriculum departments in our school boards and in our departments of education provincially, and these uh contracts and understandings go back for many, many years. And so it’s very difficult to bring about change in this system. I would note that the commercial publishers try to make out that the quality of open educational resources is, is uh lacking and that they have the quality. But there have been studies that have shown that open, adapted textbooks were, have been evaluated as having the highest quality; much more quality than copyright-restricted textbooks. And certainly in the matter of updating and keeping the content current, open educational resources are much more adaptable and available for use. And it’s important to remember that putting a “C” and restricting your copyright at the bottom of the page, or putting a “CC”, Creative Commons so as you can share the content has no effect whatsoever on the quality of the content itself. And the real arbiters of quality, the ones who know the quality of the content, are the teachers themselves, and quite often the students.


HOST
The structure of our education system and the long-standing influence of commercial publishers over curriculum decisions make any significant changes towards the broad use of OER a particular challenge in Canada, but McGreal argues that the need for these changes is clear.


RORY McGREAL
In most provinces, it has to be a provincial-level decision to have a major impact, and teachers really have little to say on choosing the textbooks in the K-to-12 area. Sometimes they’re given a choice whenever they’re renewing, every five or ten years, textbooks, they have a choice between two or three different commercially-published texts. So changes that are needed are to take the money that is now being spent on textbooks and allow schools and the teachers within the schools to make use of that money however they want. And even divert some of that money at the provincial level to other educational projects, because with open educational resources, with the free sharing, there can be huge cost savings. And by not paying commercial publishers millions of dollars a year, and in many provinces we’re talking about a hundred million dollars a year, these costs can be cut considerably, and we could use the money that we save to support the updating of open educational resources and for other means within education. So the changes are: we need a provincial government to understand the possible benefits, the cost savings available to us with open educational resources, and the quality improvements because we can make use of the content in whatever way we want.


HOST
David Porter, CEO of eCampus Ontario, has a similar vision of the policy changes necessary  for widespread adoption of K-12 OER in Canada. He explains  what he thinks should be done with some of the money that is currently going to commercial publishers.


DAVID PORTER
I would like to hear that there are going to be discussions in the Canadian context, in provincial jurisdictions to really provide funding and resources for targeted initiatives to build open resources in the K-to-12 sector. That the funding will be targeted to teachers, editors, graphic artists, subject matter and knowledge experts to work together collaboratively to begin to build sets of programmatic materials, be they textbooks, be they courseware, be they learning objects, graphic images or video, but we actually have an intentional approach that we’re willing to try and that we will evaluate to determine its effectiveness. I’d love to hear about a bold initiative from a provincial jurisdiction to do just that. They already invest millions in publisher materials. How about deflecting one or two of those millions back to the system to start to reinvent itself.


HOST
Randy Labonte of the Canadian e-Learning Network also calls for policy change, but recognizes the difficulties of expanding open practice  into provincial policy.


RANDY LABONTE
In terms of changes that are happening in the open practices landscape for K-12 in Canada, I think that there’s been progress that - limited, slowly, but making progress - in terms of the ability to share resources. There are individual schools and governments now, within the ministries, that are embracing opening up a sharing of resources. What we’re missing is a strong policy statement in that direction in Canada. So, in post-secondary we had a good policy statement that said if public monies were used to create it, then the materials would be shared openly and publicly. In K-12, there’s that intention, but that typically has broken down at the ministerial, provincial levels to make that explicit across and outside of the provincial boundaries and borders. We still very much live in a bit of a limited box in that sense.


HOST
Although Canada’s system of multiple jurisdictions provides limitations Rory McGreal explains how the system itself may actually be used to spread the  K-12 OER movement across the country.


RORY McGREAL
There are individual teachers who are using open educational resources in their classrooms, and there are a few boards around that are looking into it and trying to make use of them, but we need a strategy in our provinces, and it has to be provincial because of the Canadian educational system. But as one province moves ahead, other provinces can follow. And at the postsecondary level, this happened with British Columbia taking the lead in open education resources, Alberta followed, Saskatchewan, the three provinces signed a memorandum of understanding, and now Manitoba is involved, and I heard just a few weeks ago that Ontario is now having a post-secondary open education resource initiative. So it spreads that way. And I hope in the K-12 area that we can start with our province and move the open education resource movement around.
Once one province starts, other provinces will follow when they see the benefits. And we can look now at twenty U.S. states and see the benefits of what’s happening down there - and the problems of implementation. We can learn from their problems. And we can move, so as in ten to twenty years, I could see a time when we’re using open educational resources for all of our learning content in our schools. And this would bring about huge cost savings and huge quality improvements because teachers and students can make use of the material however they want without restrictions.


HOST
We hope that you have enjoyed listening to this podcast and will take some time to explore the other podcasts in this series taking a closer look at Open Educational Resources.
Special thanks to our guests, Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, David Porter, of eCampus Ontario, and Randy Labonte of the Canadian e-Learning Network.
This resource was funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources initiative, which is made possible through an investment from the Alberta government.
In keeping with principals of Open Education, this podcast is available under an open license, CC-by-SA.
The music "AM-Trans" and "Cash Rules" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-alike 4.0 International license.


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