The government of British Columbia has announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 most popular first- and second-year courses in the province’s public post-secondary system. The texts will be available for free online, or at low-cost for printed versions, to approximately 200,000 students. B.C.’s minister of advanced education, John Yap, announced the project at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver…. Read more »
Posts Tagged: OER
Time for BC to legislate open textbooks?
California makes the big leap – first to establish open textbook legislation for higher education. This looks like great news for students and instructors. California is establishing a fund to create a digital collection of open textbooks. The main highlights of the California open textbook program include: Free access to textbooks in the most highly enrolled first and second year courses Government funding to create… Read more »
Latest OPDF means more online learning opportunities for students
This post is from a joint news release from BCcampus and the Ministry of Advanced Education, please see the government version on their media site. Post-secondary students and faculty in a diversity of programs from medicine to shipbuilding, Aboriginal languages to physics and engineering will have the opportunity to advance their learning online thanks to a new round of projects funded by the Online Program… Read more »
BCcampus wants you
In short, we want someone with a vision to shape a real future for open education in Canada.
BC Institutional Copyright Education Sites
Republished from our Opening Education site. As part of the informal survey of institutions we did in early May (and supplemented by our own research) we gathered links to all of the Copyright education sites on campuses around B.C. I’m sharing these hoping they will be of some use: BCIT – http://www.bcit.ca/library/facultystaff/copyright.shtml Camosun – http://camosun.ca.libguides.com/copyright CNC – http://www.cnc.bc.ca/Exploring/Services/Library/infosheets/copyright.htm COTR – http://library.cotr.bc.ca/copyright_cotr2.aspx Douglas College – http://guides.douglas.bc.ca/Copyright… Read more »
Paul Stacey moving on to Creative Commons
One of BCcampus’ first-ever employees is moving on to tackle “open” on a global scale. After eight-plus years with BCcampus, Paul Stacey has accepted a position as a Senior Project Manager with Creative Commons. He will leave quite a legacy of work at BCcampus, as well as some pretty big shoes to fill. Paul joined BCcampus in 2003 as the Director of Development responsible for the annual… Read more »
Adopting Open Textbooks
BCcampus is supporting the Information Communications Technology (ICT) Collaborative Online Program in testing the open textbook waters with a pilot project this year. So far, the project has involved providing an online course, and investigating authoring tools for creating open textbooks from the various open educational resources (OER) found online.As BCcampus Client Service Manager Scott Leslie explained: “The initial request was to find suitable open textbook… Read more »
Open Professional Learning
The announcement for Open Education Week in 2011 brought about a flurry of activity. There are so many excellent learning opportunities thanks to educators willing to share their expertise and resources. This prompted some reflection among BCcampus staff on how we have walked the talk when it comes to OPEN professional learning. Here is a summary. For the past 7 1/2 years, the SCoPE… Read more »
Welcome to Open Education Week
If there’s one word we’d like used to describe BCcampus, one word that underpins everything we do, that signals our philosophy and our very reason for being, it’s this: OPEN So – welcome to Open Education Week. At BCcampus, we’re celebrating by highlighting, in the next few days, the myriad ways we live, work and breathe Open here at BCcampus. We’ve started by posting our… Read more »
Intellectual Property, Internet and Higher Ed in BC
Paul Stacey has compiled some good resources on the recent debate around two bills in the United States in his latest blog post: “The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). SOPA is intended to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. PIPA is intended to give the US government and copyright holders tools to curb access to… Read more »