By Mary Burgess Two Big Takeaways As with so many conferences, the Open Education Consortium Conference in Banff last week was a wonderful opportunity to connect with colleagues, learn new things, confirm my thinking on some issues and make me question myself on others. It was particularly nice to meet the rest of the OEC board members and staff as I had only done so online so… Read more »
Posts Tagged: OER
Weighing the Pros and Cons of Textbooks [Audio and Video]
BC Open Textbook Project Faculty Fellow Rajiv Jhangiani interviewed by CBC Radio and Global Television. Designed to be accessible, enabling, and affordable, the BCcampus Open Textbook Program started strong and continues to evolve, and it’s no surprise that interest in this project is growing across the country and around the world. Open Textbook Faculty Fellow, Rajiv Jhangiani, was recently interviewed by CBC Radio trend reporter,… Read more »
Free Four-week workshop on Open Textbooks adoption is like a “mini-MOOC” for OER
Curious about how to include Open Textbooks and OER into your teaching practice? The BCcampus Open Textbooks team is conducting a four-week-long webinar series in the new year, designed for anyone curious about open educational resources. “We’ve been getting registrations from people from other provinces and other countries, since we let people at the OpenEd 2014 conference know about it,” said BCcampus manager for open… Read more »
Vancouver to host the 2015 international Open Education Conference
Last week, several BCcampus staffers attended OpenEd 2014 in Washington, DC. Partly because of the work we’ve been doing in the OER space in the past two years, conference founder David Wiley announced Vancouver will be the site of next year’s event. At the conference, BCcampus manager for OER, Clint Lalonde, and developer Brad Payne presented on the work Brad has been doing to add… Read more »
Survey opportunity for OER faculty in B.C.
Do Open Educational Resources make a difference in the classroom? An online survey developed by BCcampus and U.K.-based OER Research Hub is being used to collect data to quantify the efficacy of OER Open Educational Resources have been popular topics for BCcampus; we’ve explored the economics of open, the intersection of open education and technology, and additional relevant posts. Collaborating with the OER Research Hub… Read more »
Four ways librarians are essential to the future of open textbooks and OER
When the Open Textbook Project started two years ago, librarians were identified as one of the important stakeholder groups with essential skills and insights to support faculty in finding and adopting quality open educational resources (OER). BCcampus began a conversation with some interested librarians, and within a year convened an OER Librarians group committed to advocating OER in their institutions. That conversation culminated in an… Read more »
Improving adoption of open textbooks through faculty advocates
Three instructors from each of three B.C. Institutions have joined the BCcampus Open Textbook team as “Faculty Fellows” in order to encourage more instructor and faculty uptake of the open textbooks in our collection. Dr. Jessie Key, a chemistry professor at Vancouver Island University, Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani, a psychology instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and Dr. Christina Hendricks, a senior instructor of philosophy at University… Read more »
David Porter moves on to find “lots of space for blue sky thinking” on flexible learning
David Porter may have left BCcampus but he remains a respected presence in the B.C. post-secondary system. Not only is he project manager for the recently-convened Task Force on Flexible Education at Simon Fraser University, but he has been elected Chair of the Advisory Council for School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University, where he also serves as a member of the School… Read more »
Justice Institute “goes big” in adopting OER and open textbooks
Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) students taking some introductory courses no longer have to worry about how much their textbooks for those courses will cost. JIBC has assigned open textbooks derived from the BCcampus Open Textbooks Project to its first-year English and Psychology courses. Their introductory Statistics course has been taught using openly licensed materials for three years already, making JIBC an enthusiastic early… Read more »
Fall 2014 for BCcampus: Open Textbooks, Symposiums and Workshops
Our Open Textbooks Project continues to generate interest from faculty and students not only across British Columbia, but internationally. Just this week, SFU student newspaper, The Peak published a special feature called The End of Textbooks and featured our very own Clint Lalonde, who is the project lead on BC Open Textbook project. The introductory open Canadian Geography textbook created during June’s sprint and mentioned… Read more »