In responding to the changing world to provide flexible, equitable, accessible, and effective forestry education, the UBC Faculty of Forestry in partners with the UBC CTLT and all AP-FECM member universities in the Asia Pacific (AP) regions has dedicated to the program ‘Innovative Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) Education in the Asia-Pacific Region’ for 10 years. As joint efforts, 14 graduate-level certificate online courses with fundamental content as Open Education Resources (OER) were developed and implemented. The course topics were widely consulted with 50 regional forestry universities and identified from reviews and surveys which demonstrated strong interests of learners and solid needs from larger societies.
The SFM online courses employed innovative open pedagogical ideas. The course development followed a modified ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) instructional design model. The Quality Matters (QM) quality standard was introduced as guidance. A team-based approach to content development, learning design and project management was established. Each SFM online course features modules broken down to weekly topics with fundamental content as OER for easy repurpose in new practices.
Since 2016, the OER course materials have been widely utilized or repurposed either partially or entirely by universities and individual users in their learning, teaching, and research, reaching out to more than 15,000 learners from over 135 economies. Especially during 2020 when COVID-19 spread globally, a series of instructor-led re-purposed online courses were offered to students in the AP region. A team-based approach was adopted in the course implementation involving over 45 instructors, teaching assistants, and education support experts. In 2020 alone, the instructor-led offerings reached out to about 3,000 learners. In the AP region.
