For the past couple months I’ve been working with David Wiley on planning the November 18-20 OpenEd conference in Vancouver, and things are kicking into high gear as we head into the fall.
David released the program on Monday (and many thanks to our local program evaluation committee Brian Lamb, Will Engle, Valerie Irvine, Irwin DeVries, & Tannis Morgan for help vetting the plethora of fantastic proposals). Keynotes for the conference will come from Phil Hill & Michael Feldstein, and a couple of current & former BCcampus colleagues Mary Burgess and David Porter.
We’ve been working on organizing a social event. It likely won’t be of the same scale as the epic sea cruise of 2012, but, like 2009 and 2012, our location is uniquely Vancouver; the legendary Roof Restaurant on the 15th floor of the Hotel Vancouver. For you radio buffs, the Roof spent 20+ years as the Saturday night broadcast home of CBC radio back in the jazz days when radio used to broadcast off the floor live jazz and big band concerts. I don’t think we can secure 97 year old Dal Richards for a gig (although, amazingly, he still performs), but the venue will still be a great social space at the end of day 1.
The Roof circa 1940
A more recent photo of The Roof from 2014
Other than that, we don’t have a ton of planned social activities for the conference, knowing that many of you will be eager to use the time to reconnect with your own groups. We will be providing some ideas of things that you might want to do while in Vancouver – restaurants, clubs, events and such. But for the most part, we’ll leave that up to the people coming to plan how they want to spend their time.
Accessibility and OER will be highly visible at this years conference with a number of accessibility organizations in attendance. The Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD (developers of FLOE), the Centre for Accessible Post-Secondary Educational Resources (CAPER-BC) and CAST are working on an interactive accessibility station that will be set up and running for the duration of the conference.
Early bird rate is $349 US (and the way the Canadian dollar is tanking these days, if you are in Canada and planning on attending, you may want to lock in sooner rather than later). After September 30th the rate is $499 US.