Open Educational Resources in Canada 2015

Canada’s important areas of expertise in open educational resources (OER) are beginning to be built upon or replicated more broadly in all education and training sectors. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in OER initiatives and open higher education in general in Canada, providing insights into what is happening nationally and provincially. There are growing examples of OER initiatives from several Canadian institutions offering free courses to Canadians and international learners. National open education initiatives include the federal government's Open Data pilot project and the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada (CMEC) support for the Open Educational Resource Paris Declaration, as well as Creative Commons Canada. Regionally, the western provinces of British Columbia and Alberta are supporting OER as part of major open education initiatives.


Introduction
The concept of open education includes the provision of activities for educators, programs to support not only the development of OER but also MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and for research and development initiatives to ensure effective practices. However, despite a growing

Background and History of OER Development in Canada
Canada is unique in the world in that it is the only country whose national government has no authority in education; in Canada, education is exclusively a provincial responsibility.  which provide the legal framework to share these resources. A non-profit organization, CC Canada supports, a legal and technical infrastructure for openness It has created a set of free licensing tools permitting authors/developers to share, reuse, and remix materials (including, but not limited to OER) with an explicit "some rights reserved but others clearly allowed" approach to copyright. As an affiliate of the larger body, CC Canada is a collaborative initiative comprising the Samuelson Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa, BCcampus and Athabasca University.

Pan-Canadian Initiatives and Organizations
In addition to helping users choose licenses and find CC-licensed work, CC Canada is a proponent of open government and the philosophy that government data should be accessible, shareable, and re-usable under open licenses by everyone. It is actively involved in this pursuit, studying how CC licenses can be used by governments to make data available freely for public use. Another CC Canada project is being spearheaded by its legal team at CIPPIC, which is researching the development of user-friendly tools that will provide comprehensive knowledge to users on how to analyze and use different open licenses. CC Canada has also launched a series of conferences, or salons, across the country in order to raise awareness of CC and its potential among different constituencies including educators, writers, and artists. In May, 2014, Robin Merkley, a Canadian, was appointed CEO of Creative Commons worldwide.

Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC). CMEC is an organization
comprising 13 provincial and territorial ministries of education. In response to the UNESCO Paris Declaration on OER, OER were discussed for the first time at a national meeting in 2012.
The Ministers "reaffirmed their commitment to open access to knowledge and education and to the need to adapt teaching and learning practices to the new realities of the information age" (CMEC, 2012). The Declaration was followed by discussions at CMEC, who met in 2013 in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and unanimously endorsed the Paris Declaration. This Declaration has played an important role in the growing support for OER across Canada and has been instrumental in the establishment of OER initiatives in the three western provinces

Collaborations -National and International.
There are also several examples of specific OER initiatives in Canada that feature national and international collaboration. OER universitas, particularly, is unique in its breadth and scope.

BCcampus. BCcampus, arguably the most active collaborative Canadian organization in
the open practices arena, is a publicly funded service which has turned to open concepts and methods to create a sustainable approach to online learning for BC's public post-secondary institutions. BCcampus was created to enhance students' ability to not only identify, choose, register for, and take courses but also to apply any academic credits earned to credentials at a selected home institution; it was also intended to benefit institutions through the rationalization of demand for academic opportunities from students with the supply of online courses from BC's public post-secondary institutions.
BCcampus has been the leader in Canada in promoting OER with CMEC. BCcampus also played a

Institutional Initiatives
Athabasca University. There has been, and continues to be, significant OER activity at Athabasca University. AU was the first university in Canada to join the Open Courseware Consortium, now the Open Education Consortium (OEC), and as of 2014, remains the only Canadian institutional member. The province of Alberta and AU were chosen to host the 2015 OEC Conference which was successfully held in Banff with over 250 delegates from more than 26 countries around the world. AU was also given an OEC ACE Award in 2014 for its highly visible OER research website, the OER Knowledge Cloud. AU has also made courses and course modules available on its OEC site.
AU is home to the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI)) and the UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER, both of which promote research into and the implementation of OER at institutional, national, and international levels. The OER Knowledge Cloud was created as a goal of the Chair initiative. The OER Chair is also a member of the board of the OER Foundation, which hosts the OER universitas (OERu).

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) Open Learning. TRU houses the former BC
Open University as its distance education wing, called TRU Open Learning. It is working with several OERu partner institutions providing initial prototype courses to be released as OER. TRU Open Learning, like AU, has a robust PLAR system that includes challenge examinations and transfer of credit, which makes it a key partner for OER initiatives nationally and internationally. Through its Access to the Future Program, the Alberta Department of Enterprise and Advanced Education has been financially supporting OER initiatives at Athabasca University. These include a project to promote OERs within the university and search out and identify reusable objects for courses and support for the AU UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER, who is charged with promoting the use of OER institutionally, provincially, and internationally.
The government of Saskatchewan, as of June 2014, has been working on an OER open textbook initiative for Saskatchewan's universities and colleges. It has been heavily lobbied by student groups and has been following the initiatives in BC and Alberta closely.

Ontario and Quebec
Ontario is Canada's largest province in population with approximately 16 million inhabitants.
However, to date there is no evidence that any provincial policy related to open practices is being considered. On the contrary, their recently announced "Ontario Online," a collaborative Centre of Excellence in technology-enabled learning, does not support OER development. Their "Shared Online Course" $8.5 million fund supports restrictively licensed resources rather than open access content.
Quebec, Canada's French-speaking province, has differed from other provincial governments regarding copyright protection in education and so has not been inclined to be supportive of OER initiatives. Quebec, as Canada's only officially unilingual province, has a thriving local Francophone cultural industry, unlike the Anglophone provinces that tend to rely on American cultural imports. The protection of the French language culture in Quebec is a paramount concern, and as such, their government is much more concerned about protecting their publishers and authors than they are about supporting open content for their educational institutions. They officially and legally use the term droit d'auteur (author's rights) to translate the term "copyright" rather than the more precise droit de copie (copy right). This is more in keeping with the European custom emphasizing the rights of the publishers and authors over the This level of openness allows many people to participate who may otherwise be unable to access learning.
In 2011, Sebastien Thrun at Stanford University delivered a MOOC on Artificial Intelligence to more than 100, 000 learners. However, this MOOC was more teacher-centric than Siemens and Downes' original connectivist MOOC. cMOOCs and xMOOCs. Downes coined the term cMOOC to describe their original course -the "c" stands for "connectivist." The goal of cMOOCs was to use the Internet to create an extended network of learners who while generating content and reflections learn from one another. David Cormier at the University of Prince Edward Island is continuing this tradition with a pre-university level MOOC, ExperienceU or XPU. On the other hand, Downes labelled the new instructivist courses xMOOCs (Downes, 2013). Recent xMOOCs continue to export the "sage on the stage" lecturing model of classroom learning to the online world (now delivered largely by video clips). The MOOC learners followed the same course materials, but they were separated from the enrolled students. However, the experiment proved unsuccessful as synergies between the two groups suffered from the separation. In 2015, the AU MOOC, "Learning to Learn Online," was delivered to more than 3,000 learners. The recognition of prior learning (RPL) or prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR) represents another facet of openness in that it is another way that students can gain accreditation and credit for learning. Adults can works toward and earn degree credit for their learning from several universities in Canada (e.g. Athabasca University, Thompson Rivers University) drawing on their non-formal learning (training and participation in workshops), or informal and experiential learning gained from the workplace or other life experiences. Achieving formal credits in this way can reduce the number of courses that a student needs to complete a degree program and also cut times and costs. On the downside, as is also the case with other nods to openness, RPL/PLAR processes are not as yet as widely recognized among traditional institutions.
Challenge for Credit, another way in which some institutions evaluate student learning, can also be considered a form of RPL/PLAR. Challenge for credit consists of a challenge examination or other form of assessment, allowing students an opportunity to demonstrate their proficiency in the subject matter and skills of a specific course without actually taking the course. Credit transfer among Canadian institutions is also becoming more widely accepted, thus promoting virtual mobility.

Conclusion
In this paper we have documented efforts, policies and programs that are designed to address innovation; visibility of adoption by others; and the capacity for potential adaptors to make trial applications of the innovation (Rogers, 2013)  institutions, especially in a confederation such as Canada, where, as previously mentioned, each province has total autonomy in education, it is difficult to be aware of many varied practices and policies that are emerging. While other countries can develop national policies, it is possible in Canada to develop trans-Canadian provincial partnerships but these partnerships operate without national government involvement.
The implementation of open education in Canada remains in its early stages. However, the growing interest in MOOCs, the recent OER initiatives, and the inter-provincial partnership MOU in Western Canada could well be harbingers of future cooperative and/or collaborative developments in Canada, placing it on a fast track to national collaborations, policy, and standards in open education.