Deadline for Proposals: Feb. 28, 2014
Deadline for Completed Projects: Sept. 5, 2014
Download a PDF of this Call for Proposals (includes all resources)
Introduction
The Ministry of Advanced Education, assisted by BCcampus, is contributing to the development of an open future for educational resources and teaching practices by providing funding to develop open textbooks. To that end, we are pleased to announce the third phase of the B.C. Open Textbook Program – a call for proposals to create new open textbooks.
The Ministry of Advanced Education funds the B.C. Open Textbook Program, and BCcampus is tasked with managing it. The goal is to provide flexible and affordable access to higher education resources in B.C. by making available 40 openly licensed textbooks in the first and second year most highly enrolled undergraduate subject areas. These texts will be available for selection by B.C. faculty, and digital versions of the texts will be free of charge to students. Print copies will also be available at a moderate cost.
Synopsis of Phase 3
In phase 1 of the project, we harvested a number of existing open textbooks and worked with B.C. post-secondary faculty to review them. The review process enabled us to provide texts for 12 of the top 40 subject areas, with some areas having more than one text.
Phase 2 of our project, which is still ongoing and overlaps with Phase 3, involves instructors adapting existing open resources to produce modified open textbooks.
In Phase 3, we are looking for instructors to create new open textbooks from scratch in areas eligible for funding. These new texts will be produced using only new materials or appropriate openly licensed content. No copyrighted third-party materials will be used.
Criteria for successful proposals
Successful proposals will meet the following mandatory criteria:
- address one of the eligible subject areas listed in the appendix,
- document any existing Open Educational Resources to be used in the new work,
- exhibit the characteristics of quality teaching and learning,
- demonstrate sustainability and cost-effectiveness,
- demonstrate collaboration within a single institution and/or between two or more B.C. public post secondary institutions,
- the final product must have an open license (Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY),
- be accompanied by a commitment to adopt the completed text in the proponent’s own course(s),
- include a budget documenting the use of the funding being requested.
The following criteria are preferred, but not mandatory:
- Preference will be given to proposals that will impact large numbers of students across multiple institutions.
- Preference will be given to proposals that include the provision of resources necessary to complete the project, such as the assistance of an instructional designer, multimedia developer, and editor. If the applicant uses available resources, it promotes more institutional buy-in to the project and thus the potential for more adoption. However, if you are unable to provide these resources, BCcampus will provide them for you.
- We encourage reuse of existing openly-licensed materials created by B.C. faculty and stored in SOLR.
Proposals will be funded in one of two ways:
- via a contract with the submitter as an individual instructor collaborating with other individual instructors, independent of his or her institution (please ensure there are no restrictions with respect to your collective agreement);
- via a contract with the submitter as a representative of an institution collaborating with other institutional representatives (please ensure there are no restrictions around this process).
Application Process
The application form should be completed and e-mailed to: open@bccampus.ca.
While the application form provides the basic information required, those wishing to submit more detail can attach appendices as required. Successful evaluation is facilitated by proposals that are well written and specifically address guideline requirements.
Because proposals will include multiple institutional partners, you must designate a lead institution for the project and submit the proposal through the lead. Institutional partners should include a letter of support identifying names and roles of participants.
Resources
Review and Selection Process
Evaluation, selection, and awards are done via independent professional peer review, against a rubric based on the set of criteria listed above.
Project Requirements
For funding to be released, projects must be completed on time, and must include all source files used in creating the textbook (including any multimedia files) to easily enable further remixing.
Final versions should be delivered in all of the following formats: high quality PDF (suitable for printing), ePub, and HTML. BCcampus will provide support in meeting these technical specifications. In addition, final versions must be openly licensed.
If you have any further questions, please email them to open@bccampus.ca..