Call for Open Online Course Environmental Scan Reviewers

Status: closed

Since 2012, the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training has funded B.C. open education initiatives led by BCcampus. The goal of the BCcampus open education project 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 courses and with select skills-training and trades subjects.

Building on our current collection of open educational resources (OER), and in an effort to support the B.C. post-secondary education system during the ongoing migration to online learning, BCcampus has begun to establish a suite of open online courses (OOCs) to provide flexible access for use in B.C. post-secondary institutions. This project includes the creation of new OOCs, as well as the gathering of existing resources into one convenient collection.

What is an open online course?

OOCs are freely accessible, openly licenced courses, and individual OER that can be used for teaching, learning, and assessment. Please visit the Open Online Course Project FAQ for more information.

Purpose

As part of the establishment of an OOC collection, we conducted an environmental scan of available OER and open course materials in our five initial subject areas, which are:

University writing – now filled
Introductory psychology – now filled
Calculus – now filled
Business communications – now filled
Business management – now filled

Now, we are issuing a call for subject-matter experts (SMEs) to do a high-level review of the resources we have gathered. We are looking for one SME for each of the five subject areas who will be responsible for reviewing all resources we have gathered in their subject area and evaluating them using our Open Online Course Environmental Scan Review Rubric. Qualified SMEs teach at a B.C. post-secondary institution in the subject area they would like to review.

Our goal at this stage is to identify only the best resources to go into our OOC collection and eliminate those that are not as high quality. We ask that reviewers refer to the rubric during evaluations, but the only writing required would be 250-word write-ups explaining why particular resources would not be worth adding. These resources will go through a more in-depth peer review as part of our peer review process for the open online course project at a later date.

Requirements

Successful applicants are expected to:

Review each course and ancillary resource in their subject area.
Evaluate resources against the quality guidelines (rubric) and recommend whether or not they should be accepted into the open online course collection.
Provide a rationale for the rejections.
Identify the course(s) at their home institutions that align with the resources they recommend.
Select the top five resources in their subject area.