I just got into Vancouver B.C. for the Open Education conference. This conference is always lots of fun with a great group of people and great exchanges of ideas. I missed last year’s OpenEd so I’m glad I got the chance to come to this year’s conference which is being held in beautiful Vancouver for the first time.

I have a couple different goals for the next few days here. One is to really start thinking about my dissertation topic since I’m pretty sure I want it to be something that will add value to the OER community. I want to learn what other people are studying and how they are going about it.

My other goal is to look for people who are doing things related to what we are doing over at MSU. Specifically, I’m looking for folks working on K12 OER so that I can make some connections for collaboration with our school gardening project. I also want to talk with people who work on OER repositories and directories and pick their brain on things they’ve learned that may enlighten our process for our food safety OER projects.

I’ll also be presenting on the last day of the conference. The title of my session is called “Piggy-backing your way to OER growth in higher education.” I’ll be talking about how we (MSUglobal) have been using back door methods to increase awareness, use, and production of OER on our campus.

I am super stoked for this week and can’t wait to hear all the speakers and meet new people and old friends!