Call for proposals to adapt or create open textbooks for skills training and technical programs

When:

August 23, 2014 @ 6:45 am

2014-08-23T06:45:00+00:00

2014-08-23T07:00:00+00:00

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 encouraging the use of Open Educational Resources and open applications wherever possible. To that end, we are pleased to announce a call for proposals to adapt existing educational resources to produce open textbooks and associated ancillary resources and to create new open textbooks in skills training and technical programs aligned with government’s Job’s Plan priorities.

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 20 openly licensed textbooks for skills training and technical programs. 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 call for proposals

Since October 2012, BCcampus has been working to produce open textbooks for the 40 most highly enrolled first and second year subjects in BC post secondary institutions. This call for proposals moves us into a new phase of development to address skills training and technical programs.

For this phase, we are looking for instructors to adapt existing resources to produce Open Textbooks and associated ancillary resources, and, in cases where no existing resources meet the needs of a subject area, to create new Open Textbooks from scratch. No copyrighted third-party materials will be used.

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 or organization collaborating with other institutional/organizational representatives (please ensure there are no restrictions around this process).

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.