Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, October 03, 2007

More on teaching and OA

Michael Wong has blogged some notes on Teaching for a World of Increasing Access to Knowledge (Vancouver, September 18, 2007).  Excerpt:

In late September at UBC, Professor John Willinsky from the Faculty of Education and Brian Lamb from the Office of Learning Technology participated in a Teaching & Learning with Technology session entitled “Teaching for a World of Increasing Access to Knowledge.” It was a remarkable discussion, mostly due to the passion and candour of the speakers as they reviewed the opportunities resulting from the emergence of open source, open access, and open educational resources.

Only 15 to 20 percent of the information available to students these days could be categorized as Open Access, and the presenters were adamant that those numbers have to go up for a post secondary education to be meaningful (and useful)....

[E]ducational institutes should be leading the way by opening up access to their research studies....

One such example of open access is a new policy adapted by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)....

Another example of open access can be seen with the recent development of UBC Circle, an institutional repository where scholarly publications and articles are stored, indexed, and subsequently made available to the public for free....

Dr. Willinsky noted that the UBC Faculty of Education has seen an 80% increase in citations since publications have been uploaded into UBC Circle and made available to the public. This means that more scholars and researchers are viewing their articles and are using this information in their own publications, students have access to this material to use in their own research papers, and the general public is able to access this material to get a better understanding about a certain topic....

[Brian Lamb argued that] open access education is equipping students for life-long learning, at a time when they have access to more and more information. Learning should not stop after one finishes school, and open access to information allows people to continue exploring this information....

Students and instructors need to continue to demand more open access to material, create their own weblogs and websites to share information, and continue to pursue a “right to know”. Professor Willinsky and Brian Lamb would be happy to show you how it’s done.