The Open EdTech Collaborative is “a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the BC post-secondary sector. No contracts or agreements are required to join us, just a willingness and ability to actively participate in our collective endeavor to:
- encourage technological autonomy and provide ways for students, faculty and institutions to own and control their own data.
- lower the barrier to participation on the open web for BC faculty and students.
- provide a more sustainable ed tech infrastructure to BC higher education that gives institutions more control over their tools. Institutions are currently at the mercy of vendor pricing, upgrade cycles, and exit strategies. This puts institutions at a certain degree of risk when there are changes to any of the variables beyond their control. Open-source approaches reduce the risk to institutions in this regard.
- assist BC faculty in evaluating and making informed pedagogical decisions around open-source teaching and learning applications.”
If you are a student or educator in BC, you can sign up for an Open ETC account , and try out the tools they support, like WordPress, Sandstorm (a collection of open source applications) or Mattermost (an open-source messaging platform) – and since Open ETC is hosted by Thompson Rivers University, these platforms are available to you on BC servers, and are thus FIPPA compliant.
Take a look and try out some of their tools. And just so you know, this blog is now on the Open ETC WordPress instance!