There’s a lot of work happening in the province of BC around OER and Zed Creds/Degrees, much of it facilitated by government funding, the expert guidance of BCCampus, and early adopters such as Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
With my colleagues Elizabeth Childs and Jo Axe, we’ve been slowly transitioning our MA and Graduate Diploma in Learning and Technology into Zed Creds. A press release yesterday announced that we completed the process.
For our students, this means no textbooks to purchase and greater transparency on the full cost of their program.
For our faculty, this means more freedoms to work with OER than with copyrighted materials to achieve desired outcomes.
It’s February, already?! This year, I’m excited to spend some time collaborating with a group of open education colleagues, as part of a BCcampus Open Education Advocacy and Research Fellowship. The rest of the team consists of Jennifer Barker, Ken Jeffery, and Rajiv Jhangiani. Good company!
The aims of the fellowship are to raise awareness of open educational practices and to conduct, present, and publish research on open educational practices at BC institutions. You can read more about what each of us is hoping to achieve in this announcement.
And since this fellowship is related to advocacy, please take 4 minutes and 40 seconds to watch the video below which summarizes the empirical evidence on efficacy and perceptions surrounding open textbooks.
Students spend a lot of money on textbooks. Alternatives to the expensive textbooks that come from commercial publishers are open educational resources, or OER. But, are these free resources as effective or of the same quality as textbooks? The research says yes. The animation summarizes the available research synthesized by Dr. John Hilton III in the aforementioned paper.
The rest of our animations are on our YouTube channel, ResearchShorts, and appear below:
The Life Between Big Data Log Events: Learners’ Strategies to Overcome Challenges in MOOCs
YouTube URL: https://youtu.be/O-Wn9ryJM6w
Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open Practices and Identity: Evidence from Researchers and Educators’ Social Media Participation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(3), 639-651.
