BCcampus Awards Second Round of H5P OER Development Grants

BCcampus has awarded six open educational resources (OER) development grants as part of the Open Homework Systems (OHS) project. The grants will be used to add H5P interactive formative assessment activities to six Pressbooks open textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection.

The OER grants total $60,000 for six collaborative projects that represent seven post-secondary institutions in B.C. The grants will be used to develop interactive activities for Pressbooks open textbooks in the areas of French language, technical writing, marketing, physical geology, and social psychology.

“As with our first round of funding in 2020, we had a tremendous response to our call for proposals,” says open education project manager Clint Lalonde. “It is obvious from the response that interest in H5P as a tool to support student practice and self-assessment has taken off in B.C.”

Approved Projects

Textbook	Project Participants	Participating Institutions	Amount Awarded	Project Description
Le français interactif	Mirabelle Tinio	Langara, UBC, UFV	$10,000	To create H5P learning objects for the French language open textbook Le français interactif, originally developed by the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004.
Technical Writing Essentials: Introduction to Professional Communication in the Technical Fields	Deb Neilsen	CNC	$9,878	To develop H5P learning objects to support the open textbook Technical Writing Essentials, originally developed by Suzan Last at the University of Victoria.
Physical Geology	Karla Panchuk	UBC-O	$9606	To create a new edition of Physical Geology open textbook with at least 150 H5P activities. This textbook was originally developed as part of a BCcampus open textbook grant and was later adapted by the University of Saskatchewan.
Principles of Social Psychology	Hammond Tarry and Farhad Dastur	KPU	$10,000	To develop H5P interactive open homework systems to support the existing open textbook Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International Edition, originally adapted by Rajiv Jhangiani and Hammond Tarry with support from a BCcampus open textbook grant.
Principles of Marketing	Biggi Weischedel	TRU	$9800	To incorporate H5P tools into the popular Principles of Marketingtextbook, giving students formative self-assessment tools to gauge their progress. This textbook has the potential to reach a large group of students, since it is appropriate for students of many disciplines as an introduction to marketing.
Foundations in Digital Marketing	Rochelle Grayson	Langara	$10,000	To enhance a digital marketing open textbook currently in development with H5P activities. Since digital marketing is an ever-changing and evolving industry, the openly licensed H5P materials can easily be updated and adapted to reflect the latest trends and developments in the industry.

To support the projects, BCcampus has created The H5P Kitchen, a website of resources related to the development of H5P activities in Pressbooks. This site is an ongoing resource for not only project grantees but also anyone who wants to effectively incorporate and develop H5P-based learning activities in Pressbooks.

“All resources that have developed on the H5P Kitchen website by Alan Levine are released under a Creative Commons license for others to reuse and remix,” says Lalonde. “These resources will be useful for anyone who supports instructors developing H5P interactions beyond this project.”

Once completed, these six projects will double the number of open textbooks funded as part of the OHS project. Five completed projects from the first round of H5P OER development funding in 2020 are in the final stages of being added to the B.C. Open Textbook Collection.

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 licenses, 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 and Skills Training has funded B.C. open education initiatives and tasked BCcampus with managing them. BCcampus’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 to enhance the existing open textbook collection through the development of complementary OHS and accompanying formative assessment questions that provide students the opportunity to reinforce and practice new knowledge. The OER development grant is a key strategy in meeting the goals of the OHS project.

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