Open Education Sustainability Grant Success

In 2019 BCcampus created the Open Education Sustainability Grant to support colleges, institutes, and universities to take the next step toward campus-based open education sustainability by further supporting the integration of open practices and methods of teaching and learning into their current systems.

Recently Capilano University completed its Open Education Sustainability Grant for Institutions project, the results of which illustrate nicely the intent of this relatively new grant. The passage below is taken directly from Capilano University’s final report on the project:

The BCcampus Open Education Sustainability helped Capilano University significantly accelerate the use and integration of OERs (open educational resources) and open practices into existing courses and our new degree programs. Despite the past creation of an Open Education Working group at Capilano University in 2018/19, we had, thus far, been unable to gain faculty interest and momentum without BCcampus funding to support faculty with release time to adapt OERs to appropriate to their discipline. Financial support through this grant was critical to growth of OERs at Capilano University. The past year and half we have seen significant interest and uptake of OERs along with more accessible courses for students. In the combined seven years from 2013 to 2019, our OER adoption saved students a total of $72,710.00, average about $10,387 per year. With the OER initiatives created from the support of this grant, we had a 1164.79% increase in OER adoption and cost savings to students in just one and half years ($16,935 in 2019 to $214,192.81 in 2020/21). In the first six months of 2021, the cost savings have already reached $127,043.25 and we expect that to exceed $240k by the end of this year.

Lauri Aesoph, manager of Open Education Operations at BCcampus, had this to say about the good news:

“This is such a lovely testament to Capilano University’s hard work and a perfect example of how this funding fulfilled its intended goal.”