BCcampus: OpenEd

The OpenEd project at BCcampus is doing great work on OER in a variety of different areas. Amanda Coolidge, Leva Lee, and Erin Fields from BCcampus will be offering an online Open Education Resources Workshop for Librarians on May 26, 10-11am, to share information on developing open textbooks, coordinating efforts for supporting open education resource access and use, and librarian leadership through outreach and multi-institutional projects. This post highlights a few of the many resources available online through the BCcampus web presence.

The Open Textbook Project is a peer-reviewed OER library tailored to the province’s needs. In just over two years, BCcampus has nearly reached their goal of finding, adapting, or creating open textbooks that align with the 40 highest-enrolled courses in British Columbia and students have saved over $500,000. The next phase of the project will add 20 textbooks in CTE areas. When you search the open textbook collection (again, the collection targets the province’s high-enrollment courses), you can see which textbooks in your search results have been peer reviewed by faculty. Reviews use an 11-point rubric and may be brief or in-depth.

BCcampus provides unique support for faculty adopting open textbooks. Their staff has published the B.C. Open Textbook Authoring Guide, an OER published in PressBooks that covers all aspects of adopting, adapting, and creating open textbooks. They also offer a P2PU course, Adopting Open Textbooks, that runs live and is available in an archived version. The course content is comprehensive and includes text, video, archived webinars, discussion prompts, badgeable activities, and participant comments.

Oregon librarians will certainly want to dig around in the BCOER Librarians section of the website. We will get to meet two members of this group at our upcoming workshop on May 26. In addition to providing leadership and advocacy for OER on their campuses, the BCOER Librarians are developing tools that currently include an openly licensed OER poster; an OER repository rubric; and a checklist for working with faculty on OER projects.

Finally, if your month of May is not completely full up yet, consider attending the Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver, BC! The conference is May 28-29, 2015, and registration closes on May 14.