Open UBC

Defining and Recognizing Excellence in OER

I recently drafted a short article about the new OER Excellent and Impact awards at UBC for CTLT’s edubyte newsletter:

The University of British Columbia has long demonstrated its commitment to open educational resources (OER) as a way to reduce student costs and lower barriers to access. This commitment is reflected in several key initiatives, including OER Fund grants that support the development and integration of OER into credit courses, collaborative support from the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) and UBC Library, and formal recognition of OER contributions as evidence of educational leadership in the university’s Senior Appointments Guide to Tenure and Promotion.

Building on this foundation, last year the offices of the Vice-President Academic at both UBC Okanagan and UBC Vancouver launched the UBC Open Education Resources Excellence and Impact Awards to recognize outstanding work by faculty who have materially advanced the use and impact of OER at UBC. These awards are intended to recognize excellence in faculty use of OER in teaching and learning, the positive impact of their work on student affordability at UBC, and their contributions to the broader open education community on campus.

Read the full article….

GenAI, Technology

GenAI and OER

My colleague Lucas Write and myself recently hosted a workshop on the potential of AI in generating dynamic content, including interactive textbooks, and its potential in developing open educational resources and practices. We also engaged in discussions about the legal and ethical considerations of both AI and open education including copyright, privacy, and open licensing. Here’s the recording:

Student as Producer, Technology

Experts in Their Own Learning (Data)

One of the events that I’ve been involved with over the past few years is UBC’s Learning Analytics Hackathons. These events usually involve around 100+ students cramming into the very cool, but windowless, Sauder Learning Labs for a full day or weekend. They dig into data from educational technologies and explore by doing the ways that the data supports (or doesn’t) their learning. It’s a very hands-on maker pedagogy approach.

One of the reasons I like being involved in these events is that they provide real transparency for students – learning technology collects data so giving students the opportunity to work with that data brings it out of the black box and into the sunlight. The goal for the most recent hackathon was to use anonymized data from a Canvas course to help an instructor answer real questions about their course. As I mention in the below article, I’m always impressed by participants’ enthusiasm and dedication. Students have real expertise in their own learning experiences and a real nuanced perspective around data and its use for learning – being able to engage with them in this space is always a fun and informative experience.

Read the full article.

OER Fund, Open UBC

Looking at the OER Fund

The UBCV OER Fund, which I help to coordinate, aims to support affordable and inclusive access to learning materials through the adoption, adaptation, development, and integration of open educational resources in UBCV credit courses. Between Fall 2019 and Spring 2022, the Fund provided $650,076 in OER grant funding for 61 projects across 11 different faculties. Earlier this fall, my colleague Trish Varao-Sousa and I published an evaluation snapshot of this grant program.

One of my favourite parts of the snapshot looked at what finished projects reported as being the most valuable part of being an OER Fund recipient. Some of the reported themes included:

The collaboration with students – e.g.:
- “Reflecting on the course and resources with students as part of the team in developing resources.”
- “Creating knowledge with a student partner and seeing the possibility of doing this in the future.”
- “Many of our doctoral students were introduced to OER concepts and examples, which expands their imagination about the future of higher education research and teaching and how they might participate in it.”
The funding to support specific collaborations (e.g., course buyouts; hiring students/GTAs) – e.g.:
- “Creating OER resources that were informed by multiple experts and allowed for a variety of voices and experiences to be presented. The resources that were created included perspectives, voices and experiences of equity deserving groups, which are often left out of traditional textbook resources.”
Skill development – e.g.:
- “I learned about what OER sources were! And I realized I could design a course without a textbook (something that was daunting to me in the past).”

You can read the entire report here: https://oerfund.open.ubc.ca/2022-oer-fund-snapshot/

Open UBC

Open Strategies for Remote Teaching and Learning

The 2020/21 academic year brought a transition to remote learning and delivery of online courses. This transition, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed the importance of student ease of access to textbooks and other course materials. One strategy for ensuring students had barrier free access to learning materials was the use of open educational resources (OERs). In the 2020/21 academic year, an estimated 19,152 UBC students took part in 60 courses that were using open or freely available resources in place of paid textbooks.

According to the AMS COVID-19 Impacts on UBC Students Survey (PDF), which was published in late September 2020, the more students agree that they have equitable access to educational resources to supplement course material, the better they are able to engage with the course content in the context of independent study and online lectures. However, according to the same survey, only 54 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am able to access resources to help me understand my course materials.” In addition, less than 50 percent of students indicated that they pay for textbooks when the class requires them.

Read my full report here.