Building on the success of the B.C Open Textbook Project, the Open Online Courses Project exists to provide a curated, faculty-reviewed collection of openly available courses in high-enrolment subject areas for post-secondary educators. The new and adaptable materials increase teaching options for instructors while offering diverse and accessible online learning opportunities to students attending post-secondary institutions in British Columbia.
The anticipated 13 open courses in the collection from the initial call for proposals will follow the guidelines outlined by the B.C. Transfer Guide, and for the most part, all will be transferable. One exception is Introduction to University Writing, being developed by Vancouver Community College, as it is a non-credit course designed to enable learners to ladder into first-year English classes.
Contributing Institutions
We announced the launch of the BCcampus Open Online Courses Project mid-June 2020. Since then, educators from Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Coast Mountain College (CMTN), the Centre of Training Excellence in Mining (CTEM), and Vancouver Community College (VCC) have all stepped up with great ideas for online courses, ensuring we have something to offer in the five subject areas outlined in the initial call. We also invited responses for other subject areas, resulting in a partnership between Below BC and CMTN that produced a repository of OER for virtual earth science trips that have transferability to courses at several PSIs.
Topics
The open courses will be valuable to educators assembling courses within the following specialties:
- Business management
- Math
- Introduction to university writing
- Psychology
- Business communications
- Earth science
Course Design
Through the call for proposals, we saw a variety of approaches to creating the upcoming courses. Some of the instructors have assembled a course-in-a-box: a complete digital kit that includes everything you might need to offer a course, such as assessments, activities, multimedia, and module content. Others have developed modular resources that can be adopted or adapted for use in courses. Some open course materials may be ready for the fall intake, and more will be available for the January 2021 semester.
Call for Proposals
The call for proposals for this phase of the project has now concluded. Folx can watch for our next call for proposals, focused on additional subject areas, in September. Sign up for the BCcampus newsletter to be notified when the next call is announced, so you can share your ideas and strategies to create powerful and effective, openly available educational resources. We’re looking forward to contributions from all PSIs in B.C.
Current Courses
The first round of the call for proposals has netted so many great ideas, which have developed into the following courses:
- CMTN:
- ACCT 150 – Financial Accounting I
- ACCT 151 – Financial Accounting II
- BENG 150 – Business Communications
- MARK 150 – Business Marketing
- MGMT 150 – Business Management
- MATH 150 – Mathematics of Finance
- MATH 251 – Statistics
- KPU:
- CMNS 1140 – Business Communications
- PSYC 1200 – Introduction to Psychology II
- PSYC 2300 – Applied Statistics
- PSYC 2330 – Cognitive Psychology
- PSYC 2385 – Social Psychology
- PSYC 4700 – Culture and Psychology
- VCC:
- Introduction to University Writing (non-credit)
- Below BC and CMTN:
- A repository of OER for virtual earth science trips