Business programs and faculty across B.C. and the Yukon have been involved in creating, adapting, and adopting open educational resources (OER) for their courses. Thanks to funding from the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills in 2019, BCcampus has supported institutions, stakeholders, and faculty to identify, develop and implement entire suites of freely available resources—including textbooks, test banks, business cases, instructor resources and other learning resources —to replace costly commercial products in Business Education over the past two years.
Goal
Our goal was to reduce education costs, increase student access, and incentivize students to pursue programs that meet the provincial labour market and human resource needs in business.
Activity
BCcampus began the Business Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) project by conducting an environmental scan of business programs in B.C. to map current OER adoptions and identify gaps where open textbooks and other OER could be developed toward creating ZTC programs and courses. In doing so we focused our initial efforts on developing OER for Marketing programs and awarded grants to support this. An additional focus was to support an institution to develop an entire ZTC program in Business.
The following is a summary of the activities and OER that have resulted from the Business ZTC project:
- First ZTC program in business in B.C. at Douglas College: Certificate in Business Administration
- Marketing OER development:
- Question bank for Principles of Marketing OER (Okanagan College)
- Creation of activities and practices questions that align with Introductory Business Statistics: OpenStax (Yukon University)
- Development of the 2nd Edition of the open textbook: Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in B.C.
All material created for this project has a Creative Commons license and will be openly shared for other jurisdictions, institutions, faculty, and students to use.
Advisory Group
To help guide this work, BCcampus put together a system-wide advisory group consisting of individuals familiar with business programs in B.C. and the Yukon. BCcampus would like to thank the Advisory Group members for their time, effort and valuable guidance throughout this project.
| Wendy Anderson | Program Coordinator & Instructor, School of Hospitality and Tourism, Selkirk College |
| Florence Daddey | Instructor, Business Administration, Douglas College, and Justice Institute of British Columbia |
| Andrea Niosi | Instructor, Faculty of Entrepreneurial Leadership, Kwantlen Polytechnic University |
| Lisa Kanary | Instructor/Coordinator, School of Business and Leadership, Yukon College |
| Anita Sangha | Instructor, School of Business, Kwantlen Polytechnic University |
| Brenda Smith | Open Education Librarian, Thompson Rivers University |
Further Information
If you have questions about the project or ideas about Zero Textbook Cost please contact us.
Download the following poster to share with colleagues, or contact us for print copies: