What are open Education Resources (OERs)?
“Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”[1]
OER Grants
UVic’s OER grant was established in 2019 with funding from the UVic Undergraduate Student Society, UVic Libraries, the Division of Learning, Teaching, Support and Innovation (LTSI), and UVic Systems. The LTSI, Libraries, and UVSS administer the grants. The grant provides funding of up to $7,500 along with staff support to help faculty members redesign a course to adopt, adapt or create open textbooks or other OER as their primary course material.
Proposals were evaluated based on the following five criteria:
- The quality of the project goals and motivation;
- The potential impact on UVic students in terms of cost-savings and learning based on the cost of educational materials being replaced, class sizes, as well as possible employment of research assistants (RAs) for the project;
- Their potential impact on student learning and the student experience in the form of high-quality materials, and open and innovative pedagogy;
- Overall alignment with the UVic strategic framework;
- Long-term plans to reuse the OER in courses in subsequent terms;
- The extent to which the OER will be freely and openly shared throughout and beyond UVic (e.g., through BCcampus);
- The feasibility of the plan and time frame: will the OER be ready within a reasonable time frame, preferably ready for the following winter or spring term?
- Logical alignment of the budget with the work to be undertaken.
We congratulate the spring 2021 grant recipients:
- Valerie Irvine and Michael Paskevicius, Department of Curriculum & Instruction/Educational Technology
Internet Radio for Open Community Engagement
Audio in open education has a long history, starting with early radio, then podcasts, and, more recently, audio-only streams on social media (e.g., Twitter Spaces). This project will install internet radio software to engage learners and the broader global community in our teaching and learning.
- Thirumarai Chelvan IIamparithi, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Creating an open textbook for ECE365 (Applied Electronics and Electrical Machines) course.
ECE365 course introduces some important aspects of electrical engineering to mechanical and biomedical engineering students. There are no open textbooks for such a course. The existing textbooks are prohibitively expensive. Moreover, their contents are not up to date. Therefore, the project aims to create an open textbook for the course.
- Gerry Ferguson, Law
Global Corruption: Law, Theory and Practice textbook
This project is designed to assist in the creation of a new and expanded open textbook entitled “Global Corruption: Law, Theory and Practice.” The new version contains three new chapters, updates and revisions to the twelve existing chapters, and new expert authors for ten of the fifteen chapters.
- Sara Humphreys and Erin Kelly, Academic and Technical Writing Program
Why Write?: A Guide for Advanced Student Researchers in Canada
A team comprising experts in writing studies at the University of Victoria has made notable progress in the past year on an OER designed to support students in first-year academic writing courses. While this open source textbook titled Why Write?: A Guide for Students in Canada speaks to broad concerns about reading, writing, and research, it has become clear that there is a pressing need for an additional OER tailored for advanced academic writers, specifically UVic honours and graduate students.
The project below is funded through BCcampus Sustainability Grant received by UVic Libraries
- Michael Paskevisius and Valerie Irvine, Curriculum & Instruction/Educational Technology
Uvic Open Hub Community Development
This project will hire students to develop the UVic Open Hub, a community of practice for undergraduates, graduates, and faculty interested in adopting open practices in teaching and research. This supplements a proposal shortlisted for the UVic Strategic Framework Impact Fund with partners from Education, Libraries, LTSI, UVSS, and Systems.
