After 59 sessions with 145+ speakers and 1300+ attendees, we are sad to say goodbye to OER Office Hours. Since 2017, Rebus Community and Open Education Network have collaborated to co-host free, monthly webinars to discuss varied approaches to OER training, initiatives, and open publishing in various discipline areas. Office Hours has been a space for members of the open community to come together and share resources, tips, and lessons learned, all while engaging deeper in conversations around open education. Guest speakers and participants alike have shared a range of experiences and insights, including their successes, challenges, and vulnerabilities.
The Office Hours team aimed to highlight voices in the field and create safe spaces for the open community to connect with, learn from, and lean on one another — with the collective aim to improve teaching and learning. Inspired by the reality of our lives, sessions offered deeper dives into topics not always discussed in open education, such as Legitimizing Burnout in Open Education Roles. Conversations allowed space and reflection for ‘outside the box thinking’, particularly around challenging the status quo, centering students in open, and OER sustainability.
“Our students come to our class to learn. We can choose to make that learning more affordable by making their textbooks open resources. But we can also do it in a way that we partner with them, we do what we call collaborate with our students and make it part of their homework.” (Sam Arungwa, Office Hours No. 55: What Happens When My Author Leaves? Policies to Support OER)
If you’ve missed a session or two, fear not! Nearly all sessions were recorded and are available on YouTube, so you can go back time and time again to watch them. You can also find Office Hours audio and chat transcripts posted on the Open Education Network Blog and on the Rebus Community Blog. Be sure to check out a few of our favourites Office Hours sessions:
- Trauma Informed Pedagogy in Open Education
- Accessibility in Open Textbooks
- OER & Instructional Design Part 2: Student-Centered Development
- What Happens When My Author Leaves? Policies to Support OER
If you’d like to share what you’ve learned from these conversations, if or how the series informed your work, and what you’d like to see in future programming, we’re all ears! Consider taking part in this short, anonymous survey to let us know what OER Office Hours has meant to you. Thank you for sharing your time, resources, and vulnerability with us over the past 5 years!