Tag Archives: oer

Open Policies

New UBC OER Fund Launched

I’m very excited to see the launch of UBC’s new OER Fund. The Office of the Provost has committed $250,000 in annual funding for the next four years to support:

  • The adoption, adaptation or creation of open educational resources which address affordability and access to learning resources within UBCV credit-based courses.
  • Course enhancements using open educational resources, including assessment materials.
  • Activities and events that seek to engage the UBCV community in increasing awareness and capacity for supporting open educational resources.

The UBC Vancouver OER Fund was established through the UBC Academic Excellence Fund to support affordable and inclusive access to learning materials through the adaption, adoption, development, and integration of open educational resources in UBC credit courses.

The OER Fund consists of two grant pathways:

  1. OER Rapid Innovation Grants: Grants of up to $1,000 which are available to the UBC community for innovative activities that increase open educational resources development, awareness and capacity building. The application cycle for this pathway will be available on a rolling basis until the funds allocated each year are exhausted.
  2. OER Implementation Grants: Grants of up to $25,000 for UBCV faculty who wish to incorporate open educational resources as the primary materials into their UBCV credit courses.

The UBC OER Fund is guided by the following principles:

  • Increase the creation, adaptation, adoption and integration of high-quality open educational resources, including assessment materials, in UBC credit courses.
  • Reduce student costs for learning materials and assessments.
  • Enable instructors to modify, edit, or adapt high-quality open educational resources to fit their unique specifications and goals in order to help provide meaningful, contextualized learning materials for UBC students.
  • Engage with the UBC community to increase awareness of open educational resources.
  • Grow capacity at UBC to support and sustain open educational resources activities.

To learn more, application forms, criteria, and support for both grants are available at http://open.ubc.ca/oer-fund.

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Open UBC

Open UBC Snapshots: OER Adoption on the Rise

Thanks to the amazing faculty and students, there’s a lot of open educational activities happening at UBC. In an attempt to quantify and explore some of the trends, I, along with some of my colleagues, have tried to dig into some of the nitty gritty details in a new resource published at open.ubc.ca that I’m calling Open UBC Snapshots.

This first Snapshot attempts to look at how open resources are replacing traditional textbooks and what we found is that the number of UBC students impacted by open resources has doubled in 2016 compared to 2015. A large driver of this trend is the great faculty in the Math Department, who have replaced textbooks with open resources in all first year and most second year courses.

In trying to quantify OER adoptions, it quickly became apparent that much of it is happening below the radar and we’ve tried our best to surface and verify OER adoptions. Largely, there is no real radar for how and which educational resources are used and I suspect that we’ll have missed some very important open practices. If you know of any open resource adoptions at UBC that do not seem to be reflected in the Snapshot, please let me know so we can be as accurate as possible. In the next Snapshot, we’ll move away from resources and examine some of the open practices have long been adopted or are emerging.

You can check our first Snapshot here: Open UBC Snapshots: Textbook Displacements by Open Resources

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