The Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at UBC, where I work, has a long history of embracing open practices. We’ve openly licensed most everything on our website since 2014, created and openly shared many different teaching and learning resources, developed and supported open technologies, such as the UBC Wiki or UBC Blogs, which make sharing easy, run workshops on all matters of open pedagogies and resources, contributed code to open code repos, had a dedicated position for open education for many years — the list goes on and on. All of this openness was due to the efforts and heavy lifting of my fantastic colleagues, current and past.

This past year my colleague Lucas Wright and myself had the opportunity to pitch a more intentional strategy in this area and this past March, the CTLT Academic Director, Christina Hendricks, posted CTLT’s new Open Access Statement:

At the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, we create open and accessible educational resources, tools, and practices. When we co-create these with faculty, staff, students, and community partners, we encourage public sharing with an open license when agreed upon by all contributors.

I, of course, love this statement and encourage checking out the full post from Christina as it lays out the great work that has already happened at CTLT and the intention to continue and improve upon that work. I also really appreciate the important alignment of open with accessibility. Having intentionality about open, and stating that intentionality as part of a unit’s values, helps ensure that we will always be moving ahead and towards our aspirational goals in this area.