Isaac Mulolani
University of Regina Open Education & Publishing Program Manager
Regina, Saskatchewan Canada
I have come into Open Education after teaching for close to two decades. In that time, I was an open source user involved in creating open resources for students in the courses I taught. My interest goes beyond making textbooks cheaper or free to finding ways to reduce the overall costs of education as well. I have been watching how the Competency-based Education movement has been leveraging technology along with other strategies to reduce the overall costs of education and thereby increase access to education. It has been particularly interesting to see that CBE programs make significant use of OER in their delivery model.
Another interest of mine is to enable the creation of more interactive and engaging OER by leverage relevant technologies. In the open-source world, recent developments have included the ability to write once and then provide OER in multiple formats. Possible inclusion in these OER are interactive elements using WeBWorK, STACK, Sage commands, Numbas as well as including videos and images. This type of OER provides students with a much more engaging learning experience in many of the STEM areas. These type of resources offer great promise for enabling student learning.