Event

A Distinguished Open Lecture featuring Professor Rory McGreal will be held on Thursday, January 11, 2024. Professor McGreal is a Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University, Canada and will speak on the topic The Power of Open: How (Open Educational Resources) OER Can Transform Education for the 21st Century. This in-person lecture will be held at The UWI Teaching and Learning Complex (TLC) and will begin at 6 p.m. 

This event is open to the public but pre-registration is required. Click here to confirm your attendance.

More About the Speaker

Rory McGreal is a Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University (AU), Alberta Canada. He is also the UNESCO/International Council for Open and Distance Education Chair in Open Educational Resources and Director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI). In addition, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's first open access journal, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL). As part of his work as a Chair in OER, he has been responsible for creating the OER Knowledge Cloud, a database of scholarly articles and reports related to OER. From 2001 to 2011, he was the Associate Vice President, Research at AU.

Previously, he was the executive director of TeleEducation New Brunswick , a province-wide bilingual (French/English) distributed distance learning network. Before that, he was responsible for the expansion of Contact North (a distance education network in Northern Ontario ) into the high schools of the region. His Ph.D. degree (1999) in Computer Technology in Education at Nova Southeastern University 's School for Computer and Information Science was taken at a distance using the Internet.

Rory was the founder of the world's first e-learning website and one of the world's first metadata learning object repositories, the TeleCampus. In the past, he has worked in Canada as a teacher and teacher representative, and abroad in the Seychelles, the Middle East and Europe in various capacities.

Presentation Abstract

Education is a fundamental human right and a public good. However, many people around the world cannot access, afford, and benefit from quality education. Open Educational Resources (OER) are a solution to this challenge. Open Educational Resources are learning resources that have been released under an open license, permitting their free use and modification. OER render this knowledge accessible to all. The introduction of OER can be an essential concrete action, supporting successful initiatives for 21st century learning. OER are becoming more widely available. The ability to reuse OER or repurpose, mix and mash, them without restriction is a major advantage in adapting resources that can address the special needs of students learning using a variety of different media. OER can be freely adapted, downloaded, and printed out by instructors, reformatted, and redesigned for specific populations or for larger, more generic groups.  In learning, the availability and ease of use of content should be paramount. This includes legal rights to highlight, annotate, print, and share content with minimal, if any, technical or copyright restrictions. OER include the right to receive a file that is not locked or crippled and subject to limitations on the type of media being used; the right to convert files to different formats for use in print or on a variety of devices and computer platforms. An essential right would be that of allowing students to access and keep OER textbooks either for shared learning or for future use in additional classes. OER, by definition, fit this description. They have minimal if any restrictions. They are technologically neutral, printable and can be adopted or adapted at almost no cost with little effort or concern by the teachers, staff and students involved in learning.