BCcampus awards five open education development grants as part of the Open Homework Systems (OHS) project. The grants will be used to add H5P interactive formative assessment activities to five Pressbooks open textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection.
BCcampus has awarded open education grants totalling $50,000 to five collaborative projects representing 11 post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. The grants will be used to develop interactive activities for Pressbooks open textbooks in the areas of English, nursing, psychology, biology, and tourism.
“We had an overwhelming response to our call for proposals,” says open education project manager Clint Lalonde. “The evaluation committee had a very difficult job, choosing just five projects for funding. But in the end, we feel that we have a broad selection of excellent projects representing a variety of institutions and disciplines.”
In addition to the scope and variety of institutions and disciplines represented, the winning projects demonstrate a commitment to including students in the development and evaluation of the learning activities.
Approved Projects
| Textbook | Project Lead | Participating Institutions | Amount Awarded | Project Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Writing for Success – 1st Canadian Edition | Brenna Clarke Gray (Thompson Rivers University) | TRU, Douglas College | $9,507 | The purpose of this project is to improve the Writing for Success textbook by integrating more hands-on, formative learning objects. Writing for Success is a textbook for use in first-year academic writing, one of the highest volume classes in the province and a course with a high degree of failure and attrition. Any effort to improve rates of success in this course will positively impact the vast majority of post-secondary students in the province, as this is a required course for most degree programs and in most transfer agreements. The H5P interactives will offer students the opportunity to reinforce, apply, and check their learning, primarily relying on pedagogical practices like spaced practice, retrieval practice, and concrete examples. |
| Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC | Rebecca Wilson-Mah (Royal Roads University) | Royal Roads University, Selkirk College, Thompson Rivers University, College of the Rockies | $10,000 | This project will support the revision of the open textbook Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC. This project will be led by Wendy Anderson, and the B.C. tourism and hospitality articulation group has now confirmed editors for the open textbook. These editors are now working on a revision of the open textbook.The team will develop H5P activities using different content types for 12 chapters of Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC to create formative learning opportunities in the open textbook. The content type choices will be made to support the learning objectives for each chapter and to develop a range of engaging digital content that aligns with the principles of UDL and encourages self-assessment and practice. |
| Vital Sign Measurement Across the Lifespan – 1st Canadian Edition | Kymberley Bontinen (Douglas College) | Douglas College, Vancouver Island University, University of the Fraser Valley, Centennial College (Ontario) | $10,000 | The open educational resource (OER) Vital Signs Measurement Across the Lifespan – 1st Canadian Edition is invaluable for thousands of health care students across Canada, providing accessible, current, and accurate textual information related to the foundational skill of vital sign measurement. Already, each chapter has activities to stimulate learning that were developed in collaboration with multiple health care professions. This project will take the existing activities and increase their interactivity using H5P and continue to include the perspectives of multiple professions. The main goals are to enhance the students’ ability to assess their learning, identify knowledge gaps, reinforce new knowledge, and enhance confidence in skill performance. |
| Psychology (OpenStax) | Simon Lolliot (University of British Columbia) | University of British Columbia | $9,870 | This project will strive to create at least 150 H5P-based formative assessment opportunities that span the complete OpenStax psychology textbook. These activities will use the full gamut of H5P content types, with careful attention paid to the synergy between the H5P content type and the academic content. The aim is to intersperse these learning opportunities throughout the textbook, providing students with regular opportunities to test their understanding. Select H5P content will be placed directly after a paragraph for immediate practice of the content, with the goal of making sure students master content before moving on. Other H5P content will appear at the end of the section for students to complete. This approach provides students with spaced retrieval practice questions while reading the text. |
| Concepts of Biology – 1st Canadian Edition | Michelle Nakano (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) | Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Camosun College | $10,000 | This project supports formative assessment by integrating H5P activities into 11 chapters of Concepts of Biology – 1st Canadian Edition, a learning resource for introductory biology courses for non-majors offered at Camosun College and at most institutions across B.C., Canada, and the world. The enhanced accessibility and instructional value will increase textbook adoptions and use by post-secondary, high school, and adult students. The project will increase the cost saving value for students and support the need for online education and self-regulated interactive learning for the foreseeable future. |
About H5P
H5P is a tool for creating over 40 different types of interactive learning activities. H5P integrates with numerous platforms, including all major learning management systems used within the B.C. post-secondary system and Pressbooks, the open textbook authoring platform supported by BCcampus. All H5P interactions created for these textbooks will be released with Creative Commons licences — which allow other educators to freely copy, reuse, and modify the interactions to fit their own pedagogical contexts — and will be contributed to the forthcoming H5P OER repository.
Additional Background
Since 2012, the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training has funded B.C. open education initiatives and tasked BCcampus with managing them. BCcampus Open Education’s goal is to provide flexible and affordable access to post-secondary learning resources in B.C. by making available openly licensed textbooks that align with the most highly enrolled first- and second-year undergraduate subject areas, as well as with select skills training and trades subject areas.
A key component of the next phase of open education work for BCcampus is the enhancement of the existing open textbook collection through the development of complementary open homework systems and accompanying formative assessment questions that provide students the opportunity to reinforce and practice using new knowledge. This OER development grant is a key strategy in meeting the goals of the Open Homework Systems project.