Author: robynne71

With us now into a new year we thought it would be a good time to provide an update on the project. 2025 was a busy and productive year for the first year of the project. After several presentations and working with University of British Columbia’s Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC) on the development of the AI study companion, we call Opterna. 

In late December we wrapped up our work with the UBC CIC. The openly licenced AI Study Companion can be found on the UBC CIC project page. As I reflect on our time working with UBC CIC on this development, I am so grateful for so many things. From getting to work with students, to sheer speed in which this all happened, and I appreciated the collaboration and consultation in the beginning of the project to really scope out what we were looking for as well as during the development process. It is very clear that UBC CIC has the expertise and knows what is necessary to complete a successful project in such a short turn around. As we were creating our wish list of features for the AI study companion, I really appreciated the conversations and decision-making process of what was realistic given where the technology is for developing with AI but stretching goals where we could to try and challenge the students to develop something new.  

BCcampus has worked with UBC CIC to deploy Opterna but we are not ready to start the testing. BCcampus DevOps folks are currently working on some other projects so for now we have Opterna in our AWS environment but in early spring once DevOps have more capacity we will do some initial functional testing of the prototype, re-add all the open textbooks, and plan out our user experience testing. User experience testing will be small groups of instructors at first, then we may branch out to students and larger groups once we have a better idea of what issues are coming up in testing and costs based on the smaller group testing. 

In the meantime, if your institution is considering adopting the AI Study Companion from UBC CIC, we would love to hear from you. It would be helpful for us to hear how the adoption goes, lessons learned, challenges, and opportunities from using the AI Study Companion. Please reach out to Robynne Devine at rdevine@bccampus.ca so we can set up a meeting to learn more about your project. 

Next up for the project is focusing on building capacity, skills, and knowledge of working with GenAI both in open education and teaching and learning. We are going to offer small grants for folks who want to explore GenAI and offering webinars or EdTech Sandbox’s on a variety of topics over the next year. Harper and Elizabeth are working the development of a workshop that focuses on working with GenAI offline. We will be offering the workshop online but if you are interested in the workshop for your post-secondary community, please reach out to us at projects@bccampus.ca and make sure you are following the BCcampus newsletter for opportunities and offerings over the next several months. 

Last week Dr. Elizabeth Childs and I had the privilege to do our first presentation about the Open GenAI project. A big thank you to the Canadian Association of Research Libraries for the invitation to come and share about the project. If you would like to watch the recording from the session, you can do so here. If you would like to review our slide deck from our presentation, you can find it here. We have a few more presentations coming up over the next month so we will be sure to share recordings here once they are available.

This past week I also reached out to the authors of the 25 open textbooks we will be using for Opterna, our AI study companion. This week I met with some of those folks, and it was really exciting to hear how interested folks are in the idea of an AI study companion with their open textbooks. The longer the project goes the more I am learning about both the technical considerations for working AI and some of the tensions that we often face with openly licenced resources. 

As I have mentioned before, we are only committed to the development and testing of a prototype and whether we host Opterna beyond the project will be informed on what we hear at the focus groups we will do in 2026.

A couple considerations that I am already contemplating are;

1. Cost and stats, open textbooks get a lot of traffic, but not all traffic is actual learning, bots mess with our stats, so it won’t be until we are in the testing phase before we have a true sense of cost to host the tool. 

2. The other tension we will have to navigate is the fact we are using an existing, pre-trained LLM so the tool is not being “trained” so it will not be going out beyond the 25 textbooks we have chosen. The pro for that approach is less inaccurate information in the responses Opterna generates. A challenge we already know we will face is that open textbooks will eventually become outdated so deciding how to know when it’s time to remove a textbook and replace with a more current version. We will need to understand what that work entails and whether we have capacity to manage that.

Anyways, that is it for now, we are having lots of fun learning, engaging with folks, and we are looking forward to lots more conversations in the near future.

We are now a few months into the Open GenAI project so I thought I would provide a few highlights of the work that has happened so far.  

We are excited to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Childs onto the project who will help us fulfill the deliverables and bring a pedagogical perspective to this work. Elizabeth comes with a long history of advocating and working with open educational practice and as the Program Head for the Master of Arts in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University has a deep understanding on learning and teaching with technology. 

We are excited to be working with UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC) who will be working with us on the development of the AI powered study companion prototype. One thing I loved about the idea of working with UBC CIC was the involvement of working with co-op students in the development. Development of the prototype is just starting, and we plan to have it completed by the end of December. The prototype will be openly accessible on GitHub once development is complete. 

As part of our continued efforts to involve students in the work, we recently worked with the BC Federation of Students (BCFS) to host a student focus group to learn from students some of their experiences, perceptions, and challenges in the use of AI in their learning journey. Once we have the prototype developed, we are hoping to work with the BCFS to get more students engaged in the testing.  If you have students who you think would like to be involved in the testing, please reach out to rdevine@bccampus.ca. 

Elizabeth and I are planning do some engagement sessions with educators to learn more about their experiences, perceptions, and challenges of using AI in their learning and teaching practices. We will be inviting educators into the testing phase to get their feedback on the tool and start to build awareness for educators who are using open textbooks on their courses.  

Hearing from students and educators will help shape our approach to the design of the AI powered study companion we are building with UBC CIC. This will also help inform what other resources we can provide when working with open GenAI tools as we look at years two and three for this project. 

Research is a big part of this work. Harper continues to dig deeper into the use of offline generative AI tools and smaller models as a way to address environmental, privacy, and ethical concerns from the post-secondary sector, and Elizabeth is exploring doing some research to share our experience, learning as part of a way to share back about this work to the larger open community. Join us at our session for the Digital Learning Strategy Forum and watch the blog for updates on how you can get be part of this action research project.