It is encouraging that last year’s OpenVA conference wasn’t a one-off event. It easily could have been. The conference was initiated and supported by the McDonnell administration, now gone, and could easily have ended with a round of pat on the backs and atta boys after the conference’s closing session, held at the Stafford campus of the University of Mary Washington. But OpenVA has come back for a second year, kept alive by the passion and dedication of the conference organizers, an enthusiastic group of educators representing Virginia’s public post-secondary institutions.
TCC’s cool-looking student center, Virginia Beach campus
The  follow-up event is scheduled for Saturday, October 18th at Tidewater Community College’s Virginia Beach campus. The event will be a little different this year, focused less on sharing best practices and more on the development of a framework of policies that support greater adoption of open resources and promote collaboration among institutions across the state. The summit, called Building OpenVA, will gather input from participants during four focused discussion sessions with the purpose of developing recommendations for a statewide open resource strategy.
The summit is for administrators, educators, legislators, librarians, and learning technologists involved with public post-secondary education in Virginia who:
- have launched successful open initiatives that they would like to expand or scale,
- know, or want to know, how to support an open initiative at their institution,
- understand the importance of openness and want to better understand how ‘open’ is currently being deployed throughout Virginia,
- believe in the promise of ‘open’ but aren’t sure how to start or sustain an open initiative,
- want to learn how to form and write policy for open education.
You can find out more about the Building OpenVA Summit, as well as respond to an open call for submissions, at the event website: http://openva.org/. And don’t forget that the 2014 Open Ed Conference will take place a few weeks later in Washington, DC, another great opportunity for VCCS faculty and staff interested in learning more about OER and global open initiatives.
