Isaac Mulolani is the Open Educational Resources Program Manager in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Regina. He works with the library staff to manage the open education initiatives across the University of Regina. In 2020, the University of Regina subscribed to the Pressbooks open educational resources development platform. He is one of two administrators for the platform at the institution. In addition to this, the University of Regina is incorporating open educational practices into its open education workflow. In the past two years, key open projects have been released where faculty have co-created and published resources with students. This has dovetailed perfectly with one of the University’s themes in its recent strategic plan (2020 -2025): involving students in discovery that arises from active learning.
He started his interest in the open education back 1997 in the open-source software movement and has continued to maintain an interest in open-source software and open education. In 2016, he was involved in the creation of four open resources under a funded grant from the Government of Saskatchewan in Canada. The Saskatchewan provincial government has continued to fund OER development with the goal of reducing costs for students, increasing access to education, and providing content relevant to Indigenous students.
As a SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellow, he developed a capstone project in Pressbooks that provides information on tools for creating open educational resources. Project developers need to be aware of tools available to them when they work with OER. The guide will increase the versatility of OER developers by providing them with information on various options for the tools and platforms available. The resource provides developers with a list of commercial and open-source tools for creating open education projects. This guide is a useful addition to the open education community which lacks a resource of this nature. The resource can be accessed at the link Tools for Creating OER: Selecting Technologies. As part of the capstone, two other resources were developed for release to the open education community. The first is a Frequently Asked Questions for OER-Open Education document. The second is a Open Education Glossary of Terms that is lacking in the community. It is expected that these will be shared and adapted across the open education community.
