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Open Education

News – Open Education
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byTaleen Aktorosian
Join the new Open Education Community of Practice!
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byTaleen Aktorosian
Call for Expressions of Interest – Open Education Community of Practice Steering Committee
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byTaleen Aktorosian
CARL Welcomes Three New Visiting Program Officers

Events - Open Education

In 2018, CARL identified open education leadership as an important area for capacity building within its institutions. In 2019, CARL issued a Statement on Open Education that describes its commitment to building capacity for open education (OE) within Canadian libraries and advocating for funding for open educational resources (OER).

Open Education Working Group (OEWG)

From 2019 to 2024, CARL coordinated the Open Education Working Group (OEWG), a group of Canadian librarians working in and committed to open education. The group was brought together to offer experienced insight towards ensuring ongoing relevance of CARL’s open education activities, and towards creating high-quality opportunities for librarians to develop capacity and leadership skills in open education. After three mandates, the OEWG concluded its business in June 2024.

-> Learn more about the OEWG

Open Educational Resources (OER) National Strategy

The Open Educational Resources (OER) National Strategy – Stratégie nationale en matière de ressources éducatives libres (REL) group was formed in June 2021, facilitated by CARL to engage diverse stakeholders, including national student groups, representatives from provincial open education organizations, scholars and advocates in open education, and individuals and groups representing institutions of higher education, to develop a strategy for open educational resources in Canada.

→ Learn more about the OER National Strategy

Open Education Community of Practice

The Open Education Community of Practice (OE CoP) aims to foster a national network of open education practitioners by facilitating communication, information sharing, and best practices. The OE CoP formed in 2025 out of the Open Education Working Group (OEWG), which was originally established in 2019 by CARL to support the development and leadership of Canadian librarians in open education. After completing its third mandate in 2024, the OEWG proposed this new Community of Practice to continue strengthening the work in this area.

→ Learn more about the OE CoP

Open Education Leadership Essentials Workshop-in-a-Box (OeLE WIAB)

The Open Education Leadership Essentials Workshop-in-a-Box (OeLE WIAB) is an openly licensed curriculum developed by the CARL Open Education Working Group (OEWG). Originally delivered as a two-day in-person workshop in January 2020, the training materials have been repurposed to support academic librarians in building their open education leadership skills. The OeLE WIAB can be adapted for use at regional or institutional levels, providing a flexible framework for professional development.

Available on Google Drive, the OeLE WIAB includes a facilitator’s guide, slides, worksheets, detailed teaching plans for both in-person and virtual sessions, and additional resources. Topics covered include open education fundamentals, stakeholder engagement, advocacy, and institutional change. To learn more, consult the Facilitator’s Planning Guide or email to share feedback or report your use of the materials.

→ Access the OeLE WIAB

Open Education FAQs

Open education (OE) is an approach to education that aims to remove barriers to learning by engaging in open educational practices (OEP) in class and through the development and use of open educational resources (OER).

Open educational practices (OEP), also known as open pedagogy, are teaching and learning practices where openness is enacted within all aspects of instructional practice, including the design of learning outcomes, the selection of teaching resources, and the planning of activities and assessment. Leveraging networked technologies, OEP engages faculty and students in collaborative knowledge creation while empowering students to be full participants and partners in learning communities.

Open educational resources (OER) are free to use and openly licensed teaching and learning materials which can include textbooks, course reading lists, assignments, case studies, lectures and other forms of learning materials that have been produced by experts and educators in the field. Educational resources can also include scholarly outputs that are in the public domain and therefore also free to use as part of a course. As stated by leading open education proponent David Wiley, “‘open content’ describes a copyrightable work that is licensed in a way that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities which are retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.”

Libraries provide access to resources free of charge to faculty, students, and staff of their institutions; however free-to-access is different than licensed to use in open environments, or  to adapt and remix for education use. From SPARC’s FAQ on Open Educational Resources: “Open educational resources are and always will be free, but not all free resources are OER. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access those resources). Moreover, free-­but-­not-­open resources may not be modified, adapted or redistributed without obtaining special permission from the copyright holder.”

Open education is happening to some degree in all provinces in Canada. A number of provinces and some individual institutions have demonstrated support for open education by funding the creation, adaptation, and reviewing of OER. Academic libraries have been active in the promotion of open education, while student groups have been the strongest advocates for OER. The two strongest provinces in terms of supporting open education currently are British Columbia and Ontario, with their BCcampus and eCampusOntario digital learning initiatives respectively. Open education takeup has recently shown significant growth in Québec as a result of the province’s Digital Action Plan for Education, which includes the initiative la fabrique REL, a collaboration between Université de Montréal, Université de Sherbrooke, and Université Laval. In Canada’s eastern provinces, the Council of Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL-CBUA) has contributed funds to launch a Pressbooks instance and has offered grants to support OER production through AtlanticOER. A full report of open education services and support initiatives in Canada was completed by the CARL Open Education Working Group in 2020. A webinar was also offered to present the findings of the report.

Open education practices give educators the opportunity to rethink their instruction practice to focus on students as partners in the knowledge creation process. Open education gives students the opportunity to authentically engage in the creation of knowledge that is then shared openly adding value to the world.

Open educational resources give educators the flexibility to adapt already existing resources for the specific needs. This ensures the resources are up-to-date and reflect the learning of objectives of a particular class.  Open educational resources similarly benefit students by ensuring the content is developed with their specific needs in mind and that cost is not a barrier to accessing high-quality resources for their course.

Academic libraries are key stakeholders in open education in a number of ways, and faculty are increasingly recognizing their expertise and resources. Academic libraries are:

  • Collaborating with faculty in finding open educational resource content for use in their courses.
  • Applying their expertise in copyright, open copyright licenses, and intellectual property toward the acts of creation and adaptation or remixing. For open pedagogy courses, students not only need to understand copyright and intellectual property but also how to use tools for content creation (e.g. Pressbooks, H5P).
  • Engaging in education and training of faculty and students in the elements needed to be successful in their open education practices.
  • Hosting the tools needed for open educational resources publishing (e.g. open journal systems, open monograph systems).
  • Providing expertise in discoverability and sharing of open education resources, including consulting on resource release plans that often include library support for metadata, archiving, and communication.

Getting Started with Open Educational Resources

The following resources provide an excellent place to start searching for OER for your courses. Additionally, the library or teaching and learning unit can be an excellent resource to help you identify the OER available to you.

Province-level repositories of open educational content in Canada:

Although not a repository, the La Fabrique REL website includes a section that lists its completed projects.

Searchable international databases for French resources:

  • BNEUF – database of open resources (not all OER) maintained by the Agence universitaire de la francophonie
  • Ceres – a Québec-France collaboration, Ceres is a collection of primarily French-language free online content (not all this content is fully open)
  • REL@UVA – collection of open content managed by the African Virtual University

Searchable international databases that contain primarily English resources:

  • Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) – OASIS is one of the largest databases that allows searching for OER content from many different sources.
  • OER Commons – OER Commons offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners.
  • Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) – The Mason OER Metafinder searches across 21 well-known OER repositories including OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT and also open content sites such as HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections.
  • MERLOT – The MERLOT collection consists of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages. Materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection.
  • Open Textbook Library – Read peer reviews and access open textbooks being used across the world.
  • Milne Open Textbooks – Milne Open Textbooks is a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by State University of New York (SUNY) faculty and staff, and maintained by Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo.
  • OpenStax – Peer-reviewed open textbooks on introductory topics. Students can buy print copies. OpenStax has quiz banks, slides, and other ancillaries freely available for instructors who sign up with them. See Teaching online with OpenStax to support emerging social distancing requirements (blog post).

When finding an OER you may want to take advantage of the ability to modify the content to make it relevant for your specific course learning outcomes, assessment approaches as well as your teaching style. Use the following tips to guide you when adapting or remixing and OER:

  1. Check the license of the resource to make sure you have the right to adapt or remix.
  2. Select a platform you will use to adapt the resource. Although there are several available platforms specific to OER (e.g. Pressbooks, Open Monograph Systems), OER can be released in practically any format.  The platform will depend on the kind of resource you are creating and what is easily available to you at your institution, freely online, or through provincial supporting bodies (e.g. BCcampus, eCampusOntario, OpenEd Manitoba)
  3. Provide attribution (i.e. citations) for the sources you are modifying.  Even if the resource is in Public Domain, it is best to model academic citation practices.

Sharing your resources is a way you can support the growth and health of the open education community and support the ongoing efforts for affordable barrier-free education. Use the following tips to get started sharing your educational resources;

  1. Attach a Creative Commons license to your original work to indicate that others are free to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and/or redistribute the resources.
  2. Decide what types of functionality and features you need to share your OER in a repository.
  3. Select a space/or spaces to make your work discoverable.  This may include your institution’s open repository or third-party repository. Some examples of OER repositories are listed in the “How Do I Find OER” section above. 

Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Some content may be created, edited, or translated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools and is reviewed by CARL staff before publication.

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