History of Open at Fanshawe
Faculty and students at Fanshawe College have been realizing the benefits of Open Educational Resources (OER) for many years. Please see the timeline below, which highlights some of the key events that helped to shape open work at Fanshawe.
Open Education Day 2019
As highlighted in the timeline above, Fanshawe College hosted three Open Education Day events from 2019-2021. During the event in 2019, a survey was administered to students asking them questions about educational resources and the factors that impact their decision to buy them. Over 120 students completed the survey. Overwhelmingly, students reported that they have made the decision not to purchase required textbooks due to cost. They also stated that they believed not having the resources affected their course grades. From these results, it became clear that more work was required to bring awareness to the college about open resources in order to better support our students.
Open Education Day 2020
At Open Education Day in 2020, faculty were surveyed to assess their OER awareness and to determine whether or not they would be likely to adopt or use OER. Faculty in attendance reported that they were familiar with OER, and the majority responded that they would be likely to use OER in their classes. However, the respondents commented that they would require training and support to help them find and create OER for their teaching. This information provided the basis for future discussions at the college around how best to support faculty to encourage OER adoption.
The Fanshawe Library and Learning Commons set up a Textbook Broke campaign during Open Education Week 2020 in the library that asked students how much money they spent on textbooks. The whiteboard display seen in the image below is the result of that engagement.
Fanshawe’s Open Learning Management System
Update: our FanshaweOpen LMS site has been decommissioned as of June 2024.
As we considered how to engage faculty in open resources, we also faced challenges in providing resources to students studying online to help them succeed. We came across an excellent open resource from KPU called Learning to Learn Online, which provided materials we could adapt for our own online learners.
One of the challenges for students new to online learning is navigating the learning management system (LMS) and the tools integrated into it. We wanted to find a way for students to access the LMS before registering as students, so they could try out online learning before committing. We had the idea of creating a separate version of our LMS from Desire2Learn (D2L) with the same overall look and feel. We called this new system FanshaweOpen. Then we created the course Learning to Learn Online based on the KPU resource. With very little marketing beyond links on our college’s website, the course has been accessed by over 1300 registrants since its creation.
