On October 1, UBC staff and faculty were invited to attend a panel discussion exploring experiences in implementing open educational resources (OER) projects at the University of British Columbia.
Christina Hendricks, academic director at the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, moderated the panel, in her introduction she defined OER as “any teaching and learning resource that can be anything from a text, a reading, syllabus, or assignment directions, to videos, podcasts, and other digital objects that are licensed to allow re-use by others without asking direct permission from the copyright holder or revision by others and free of cost to do so.”
The panel featured four successful projects from different departments and disciplines across campus: Mathematics; UBC Library; Chemical and Biological Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies.
CLP Calculus, textbooks with students in mind
Elyse Yeager, Joel Feldman, and Andrew Rechnitzer, faculty members in the Department of Mathematics, created CLP Calculus, an open access working textbook project for their four series calculus courses: differential, integral, multivariable and vector calculus.
Yaeger explained that they decided to pursue the project when they realized that calculus textbooks for their students could cost up to 200 dollars.
CLP Calculus is a collaborative effort between instructors and students. Yaeger, Feldman and Rechnitzer create the content and exercises, and students contribute by editing the content through a bug bounty process, an incentive program encouraging students to identify mathematical errors in the CLP textbooks.
The overall reaction to CLP Calculus has been positive. In the 2018/19 academic year an estimated 5,500 students in Math courses used the CLP textbooks, resulting in a potential cost savings to students of $550,000 to $607,000 dollars.
Given its open access nature, the audience is expanding beyond UBC with 4,800 downloads in 2018 to over 8,000 in 2019, and the numbers are still growing.
Creating open resources projects across campus though small grants
Leonora Crema and Stephanie Savage from the UBC Library applied for a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) grant in order to assist faculty in creating, adapting, or adopting open textbooks and OERs across subject disciplines. For this, they created small grants for faculty to develop these projects with support from the library.
The project created and updated a total of 10 open textbooks and OER in multiple subject areas including physics and astronomy, history, computer science, philosophy, mathematics etc. The UBC Library project has also contributed to student cost-savings for course materials.
In a student survey to assess the overall project, their reactions were positive. 80% of students preferred open textbooks to traditional ones and 75% agreed that using these reduced the overall cost of the class.
“It’s imperative open textbooks become mainstream if we are to continue to say that university [education] is for everyone,” one UBC undergraduate student commented.
Contributing to the Open Problem Library at WeBWork
Engineering departments at UBC have usually worked in isolation even though their courses have content that overlaps between them. Wanting to change this Agnes d’Entremont, Jonathan Verrett, and Negar Harandi, faculty members from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering set out to extend the Open Problem Library at WeBWork, an open-source online homework system, in common subjects at second-year level engineering courses through a TLEF grant.
The project has led to the creation of problems for 13 different subject areas with a contribution of more than 300 posted problems, created by UBC faculty and teaching assistants, and over 1,000 questions which are currently in testing; compared to the original 3 subject areas and only 260 engineering problems available in the platform. The problems are openly licensed and shared in WeBWork’s Open Problem Library, enabling them to be used by institutions around the world.
Students have reported they like WeBWork as they receive immediate feedback and enjoy that it is of no cost to them. The usage of the platform has motivated students to successfully complete their homework and believe that it enhanced their learning.
UnRoman Romans Project
When Siobhan McElduff, associate professor from the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, was planning her course CLST 360E UnRoman Romans she found that there were more secondary texts than primary ones on the subject. With this realization, she decided to gather primary sources on a range of topics with the aim of creating a better selection of sources which her students would produce as assignments by the end of the course.
Students enjoyed realizing that they could contribute to scholarship and that they knew more about race, gender, and sexuality than some of the academics they were reading. As a result, the students were interested throughout the course. By engaging with the primary sources, students realized how they had learned about various topics on the level of academics.
The final projects will be incorporated into an openly-licensed reader and McEldfulff hopes to include the reader into the BC Open Textbook Collection after BCcampus‘s review process, giving the students the possibility of being part of a robust textbook collection and including a publication in their CV.
Panelists agreed that OER projects can bring benefits to both students and educators. Elyse Yeager expressed how her motivation to pursue OER came from student wellbeing. In math courses, students must buy textbooks to be able to complete their homework, however, many do not purchase them because of the cost. Yeager recalls students saying “I can’t afford it, I [would] rather eat that 10% of my grade.”
Agnes d’Entremont and Jonathan Verrett expressed that although producing the open public library they developed required a large initial amount of work from them, they see value in it because students receive immediate feedback on their homework and this has improved their learning.
UBC is committed to making education more accessible and has incorporated OER in its strategic plan, Shaping UBC’s Next Century through the theme of inclusion. The university “is committed to making education more affordable and accessible, with expanded creation and dissemination of open educational resources.”
References and resources
- OER Fund provides grants for projects that wish to create awareness of OER or for faculty who want to implement OER in their courses.
- 2019 Open UBC Snapshot provides an overview of how OER are being used at UBC, as well as the strategic policies that are supporting open resources.
- Open Education Getting Started Guide and the Open Education Toolkits for more in-depth how-to resources on creating OER and open projects.
- Open Dialogues story series which highlights how faculty are applying OER on campus.
- Open UBC Examples for more OER projects.