This session will provide an overview of the BCcampus Open GenAI project. This 3-year project is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The goal of this project is to create an open GenAI study companion prototype (Opterna) and to build the capacity of post-secondary educators in B.C. with respect to open.
The creation of Opterna was guided by the design principles of collaboration, open pedagogy, inclusivity and equity, learner empowerment, and ethical criticality. It was informed by several open frameworks including the traditional 5R permissions of OER (Wiley, (2014), Sinkinson’s (2018) , Jhangiani’s (2019), Clarke-Gray’s (2025), and Hegarty’s (2015)) . Opterna utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) and uses the B.C. Open Collection corpus. It was designed for use by instructors and students in support of student learning.
This presentation will speak to the design considerations and introduce the draft framework for ethical AI, and an overview of Opterna.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Describe the goals for the BCcampus Open GenAI project.
- Examine the functional Opterna prototype.
- Identify opportunities and challenges of working with open GenAI in teaching and learning.
- Describe ethical considerations for using open GenAI tools.
- Explore how to use open GenAI with open educational resources.
