Open UBC Snapshot 2021: Open Strategies for Remote Teaching and Learning

The 2020/21 academic year brought a transition to remote learning and delivery of online courses. This transition, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed the importance of student ease of access to textbooks and other course materials.

One strategy for ensuring students had barrier free access to learning materials was the use of open educational resources (OERs). In the 2020/21 academic year, an estimated 19,152 UBC students took part in 60 courses that were using open or freely available resources in place of paid textbooks. This replacement of traditional textbooks with open resources has potentially saved UBC students an estimated $1.9 to $2.7 million this academic year. The wide range of savingsis range reflects alternative buying options available for students, including new, used and rental textbooks.

About the Open UBC Snapshots
Open UBC Snapshots attempt to quantify and explore emerging trends in open educational practices at UBC. The CTLT compiles the statistics and information with support and input from the broader UBC community. Numbers used in this report represent a snapshot of verified activities at UBC; however, a large portion of open educational practices happen independently and may not be accounted for in this snapshot. Please help us make this series more complete. If you are using open resources in your teaching and learning or are aware of any open practices or adoptions on campus, please let us know!

Open Resources at UBC

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are defined as “teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, a Creative Commons license) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere.” The 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration states that open education and the use of OERs contribute “to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.”

During COVID-19, OERs are an important strategy for providing access to learning materials as they are free for both students and instructors and are often available in a variety of digital formats. Downloadable and offline formats are particularly important for low-bandwidth contexts. Additionally, OERs have an open copyright licenses that enable instructors to edit and modify them in order to provide meaningful materials adapted for their specific teaching contexts and students.

UBC faculty, students and staff have a history of engaging with a broad range of open educational activities including:

• The adoption and adaptation of freely available materials which may include OER and the curation of varied media such as videos and text. The openly licensed materials may also be modified or remixed to contextualize them for specific courses or students.
• The creation of OERs, including high quality multimedia resources, open textbooks, and open problem sets, that are used by multiple UBC courses as well as by other institutions across the world.
• The adoption of open pedagogies and practices that leverage UBC’s open technologies, such as the UBC Wiki or UBC Blogs, to allow for flexible, authentic, and accessible learning. These practices often emphasize students as collaborators in the production of knowledge.
• The development and delivery of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that anyone in the world can take.  Additionally, UBC instructors often reuse their MOOC resources for credit courses. For example, instructors in UBC Computer Science have developed a series of online courses for an edX Software Development MicroMasters and have replaced paid, print textbooks in their UBC courses with rich multimedia learning materials, such as videos or problem sets, developed for the edX MOOCs.

For a full discussion of the types of open practices at UBC, please see past Open UBC Snapshots and the Open UBC Education Examples Directory.

This snapshot specifically examines courses that have used openly or freely accessible resources in place of paid textbooks. It also includes resources that are free of cost and access barriers but do not include a permissive copyright license that would allow for the resources to be adapted, copied, or shared without direct permission of the copyright holder. At UBC, such resources often take the form of custom course notes, self-developed MOOC materials, or textbooks and other learning resources that the instructor has created and posted publicly online but which do not include a stated permission for reuse and/or an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. Numbers used in this report represent a snapshot of verified activities at UBC; however, a large portion of open educational practices happen independently and may not be accounted for in this snapshot. For the purposes of this report, resources that are not publicly accessible were not included. Please see Appendix A for a sample of open resources used by courses at UBC.

Open Resource Impacts

At UBC, a significant number of students are impacted by the use of open or freely available resources. In the academic year 2020/21, an estimated 19,152 students took 60 courses that were using open or freely available resources in place of paid textbooks. Since 2011, at least 311 UBC courses, or course sections have been identified as having used open textbooks, OERs, or freely accessible resources instead of paid textbooks. Across those ten years, an estimated 101,274 UBC students were enrolled in those courses using open resources.Student impacts are based upon enrolment data for only the specific course sections that used the OER and thus impact number for a specific course may be less that total enrolment in that course.

The estimated cost savings for students has also been significant. The replacement of traditional textbooks with open resources has potentially saved UBC students an estimated $1.9 to $2.7 million dollars this academic year and between $10.1 to $14.5 million since 2011 academic year.

This range reflects alternative buying options available for students including new, used and rental textbooks and is based on the approach used by the BC Open Textbook project to estimate savings. The high end of the range is based on new textbook prices and course enrolments while the low end value is calculated based on an average cost of $100 per student per textbook. For courses in which the replaced textbook cost less than $100, the lower amount was used for both the high and low range.  Additionally, in courses where the original textbook cost is unknown, or if the instructor intentionally chose to use open textbooks when the course was created, a $100 per student cost savings has been used to calculate potential financial impacts. The widening range between high and low cost savings may be indicative of a rising costs for textbooks and other learning materials.

Looking at the minimum cost savings range of an estimated $10.1 million since 2011, it is clear that there is a long tail of courses that have a sustained and substantial contribution to OER cost savings for UBC students.

High enrolment courses in the Faculty of Science, where instructors are using open resources, represent a significant source of student savings. Instructors’ efforts in the Department of Mathematics to create, improve, and implement open resources continue to have a high impact.

The CLP Calculus textbooks by UBC Mathematics faculty Joel Feldman, Andrew Rechnitzer and Elyse Yeager continue to be the most widely used OERs at UBC; approximately 7,200 UBC students used them in the 2020/21 academic year alone. Additionally, according to the CLP site analytics, the texts received an additional 120,000 unique visitors between January 1, 2020 and March 1, 2021. This four-volume series of open textbooks includes supplemental problem books based on past UBC exams, midterm tests and quizzes as well as combined exercise versions that integrate the text and problem books into a single text available in both web and offline version.

Resource Affordability During COVID-19

Ensuring that students have access to textbooks and other educational materials is important for learning, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the AMS COVID-19 Impacts on UBC Students Survey (PDF), which was published in late September 2020, the more students agree that they have equitable access to educational resources to supplement course material, the better they are able to engage with the course content in the context of independent study and online lectures. However, according to the same survey, only 54 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am able to access resources to help me understand my course materials.” In addition, less than 50 percent of students indicated that they pay for textbooks when the class requires them.

Students are turning to OERs to supplement their learning. According to the 2020 AMS Academic Experience Survey (AES), 87 percent of students reported using OERs in place of a textbook. However, while the use of open or freely available educational resources continues to have widespread utilization and increasing support at UBC, the affordability of course materials still represents a barrier to learning. According to the 2020 AES survey, the average amount UBC undergraduate students spent annually on textbooks was $884 with one in five undergraduate students reporting that they spent $1,000 or more. The survey also found that 77 percent of undergraduate students reported that they have been assessed in courses through online portals that required paid access.

The cost of learning materials can have real impacts on student wellness as well as teaching and learning. According to the survey, ten percent of undergraduate respondents reported they strongly agreed that they worried about how to pay for textbooks and class materials with another 34 percent indicating that they were somewhat worried.

Eight percent of undergraduate students also reported they strongly agreed that they might not be able to come back to UBC at some point in the future due to financial reasons with another 20 percent indicating they were somewhat worried about this concern. Such financial precarity can lead to decisions that may impact learning. For example, 67 percent of undergraduate students reported that they went without a textbook or other course resource due to cost, with 28 percent reporting that they frequently or often go without such learning materials due to cost.

According to a synthesis study of empirical research by John Hilton III on the impacts and perceptions of OER adoption, OERs simultaneously save students money without negatively impacting their learning. According to Hilton, more than 95% of published research between 2015 and 2018 found that the use OERs lead to the same or better student learning outcomes and the vast majority of students and faculty who have used both OERs and commercial texts believe OERs are of equal or higher quality.

Please see the 2019 Open UBC Snapshot for a discussion on research findings that show how OERs can improve learning and the overall student experience.

According to the AES, nearly 90 percent of students indicated that they had bought a textbook or other course resource and didn’t use it, or rarely used it. The use of OERs is a great strategy for providing access to online course materials because it is free for students and instructors. No access code is needed and there is no expiration date, meaning that students are able to continually access the material as needed. For instructors, OER is easy to circulate among an unlimited number of students. Due to the open copyright licenses of most OER, they can be used, edited, or adapted without fear of copyright infringement and thus be adapted to suit student needs, teaching methods, and curriculum.

Open Pedagogies and Assignments

The 2020/21 academic year transition to remote learning due to COVID-19 led to many instructors rethinking course assignments and projects and incorporating aspects of open pedagogy. Open pedagogy has many different definitions but it often involves a blend of learner-centric teaching practices and participatory technologies that emphasize students as creators of knowledge and contributors to the public commons.

Open assignments work well in remote teaching and learning and there are many examples of open pedagogy at UBC, such as:

• Students in Sarah Sniederman’s ANTH302A: Ethnography of South Asia course created an Ethnography of South Asia Pandemic Experiences Knowledgebase
• Siobhán McElduff’s CLST360 students created an OER reader on socially stigmatized groups in ancient Rome as part of their course assignments. The reader contains out of copyright and original translations of ancient texts, along with student-scholar created introductions, glossaries, images and other explanatory material.
• Students in Jon Beasley-Murray’s LAST100: Introduction to Latin American Studies course created videos about specific course topics and wrote weekly personal reflections on their blogs.
• In Janette Bulkan and Fernanda Tomeselli’s FRST 522, FRST 370, and CONS 200 courses, students created open conservation resources and contributed them to the Open Case Studies Project.
• Students in Pam Kala’s BIOL4 63 course contributed their knowledge to genetic article stubs on Wikipedia.

Such open assignments position students as emerging scholars. This brings the university’s approaches to learning and research into closer alignment; for example, students, similar to researchers, are asked to share their work with others and not just their immediate instructor or advisor. This alignment of course work with scholarly practice can encourage students to learn and apply information, gain critical digital knolwedge, engage in authentic problem-solving, and help to develop a culture and practice of academic integrity.

Interesting in Open Pedagogy? Please see the Program for Open Scholars and Educators (POSE) Unit on Open Pedagogy for more examples, considerations, and information.

Increased Institutional Commitments and Efforts

According to a 2021 U.S. report (pdf) funded by the Hewlett Foundation, the overall adoption of OERs as required course material did not increase significantly during COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the report, which was based on responses from over 3,200 U.S. faculty and department chairpersons, also found that faculty who were aware of institutional or system-level OER initiatives were also three to four times as likely to adopt OERs as those who were not aware.

To institutionally support and sustain the use of OERs at UBC, in 2019 UBCV committed $1 million over four years to the UBCV OER Fund for the development and integration of OERs into UBC credit courses. In 2020/21, the OER Fund awarded $175,950 across 24 OER projects in nine different Faculties. When fully developed and implemented, the resources created by these projects should impact at least an estimated additional 4,000 students per year and result in significant cost savings when they are used in place of paid learning materials. It is estimated that over 65% of total funding will go to hiring students to support and co-create these projects. Please see the list of funded projects for an overview of the wide range of subject areas and types of OER projects supported through this fund. These projects are still in development and an exploration of their impacts will included in the next academic year snapshot report.

UBCO was also awarded one of BCcampus’ 2020 Open Education Foundation Grants for Institutions, which helped to accelerate UBCO’s open education efforts. With additional funds from UBCO VPA, the Library implemented and supported the 2020/21 OER Grant program, and awarded $41,525 across 9 projects to create or adapt open educational resources to be implemented in UBCO courses by January 2022.

Additionally, both the UBCO Aspire-2040 Learning Transformation Fund (ALT-2040 Fund) and the UBCV Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) encourage faculty to develop or integrate open educational resources. In 2021, 10 TLEF projects and one ALT-2040 project identified an explicit open strategy.

Increasing Capacity

In 2020/21, UBC also organized a number of communities, events, and sessions for faculty, students and staff to promote and increase capacity for open educational practices. The UBCO Open Education Working Group, which was formalized in 2020, and the Open UBCV Working Group enhance awareness and build capacity for the adoption, adaption, and creation of OERs. This was done through sharing information and coordinating efforts among key stakeholders and partners who lead and support open education initiatives at UBC (e.g., faculty members, Faculty instructional support units, teaching and learning centres, Library, Bookstore, the UBCO and UBCV student unions and BCcampus).

UBCV supported a number of unique open initiatives and events to increase awareness and capacity for open resources, including:

• Leaders in Open Learning 2020 – A celebration of UBCV OER Champions, in which the UBC Alma Mater Society (AMS), in partnership with the UBC Library, CTLT, and VPA, recognized UBCV faculty who created or used OERs in response to moving UBC courses online.
• Open Scholarship in Practice 2020 – A week-long event offering workshops and speakers in the areas of open access, open education, and open research.
• The 2020 Virtual Student Learning Analytics Hackathon — a full day event which provided transparency into learning tools and data by having students create learning analytics tools using their own student data.
• The Program for Open Scholarship and Education — in spring 2021, the UBC Library and CTLT created and delivered a four-month open access course for faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students with an interest in open research, open access, open data, and open education. Approximately 60% of the 147 enrolled learners were from UBC with the remaining from other institutions within BC, Canada, and abroad.
• Ongoing open education workshops –in 2020/21, the CTLT and UBC Library hosted more than 40 different workshops focused on different aspects of OER, open pedagogy, and the use of open tools.

Additionally, to help instructors and students respond to the shift to remote learning, UBCV published a number of open educational teaching and learning resources, including the Online Teaching Program and the Keep Teachingand Keep Learning websites designed to support the transition to remote teaching and learning at UBC. In March 2020, the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at UBCV published an open access statement affirming that it creates open and accessible educational resources, tools, and practices and encourages public sharing with an open license when agreed upon by all contributors.

Looking Ahead

The delivery of online courses due to COVID-19 exposed the importance of providing barrier-free access to course materials and assessments digitally. Instructors who use paid digital materials continue to cite the ability to provide ancillary resources such as homework systems, quizzes and problem banks as important factors in their learning material choices. The use of fee-based homework systems and bundled quiz packages have the potential to add more fees and barriers for student access to learning.

To address this issue, in 2019, the UBCV Senate, with support from student advocates, endorsed principles to address and limit fees for access to digital materials or tools that are used for assessment. In February 2021, the UBCO Senate, went further and formally approved Policy O-131.2, which states that no student shall be required to purchase access to a fee-based digital assessment tool, including those sold as a Bundled Resource, for any UBC Okanagan course. These principles and policies support equitable access to assessment. Open problem banks, OERs, and open homework systems such as WeBWork will continue to be an important strategy for meeting these priorities.

Access to course materials will continue to be an important aspect of learning throughout the continued duration of COVID-19 and in the post pandemic world. UBC’s commitments to increasing the scope, and sustaining the use, of OERs and open educational practices will continue to have positive impacts on student learning and experiences regardless if courses are online, in-person, or a hybrid of both.

References

Hilton, J. (2020). Open educational resources, student efficacy, and user perceptions: a synthesis of research published between 2015 and 2018. Education Tech Research Dev. Retrieved from: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11423-019-09700-4.

Lalonde, C. (2015). Calculating Student Savings. BCcampus. Retrieved from https://open.bccampus.ca/2015/02/18/calculating-student-savings/

Insights West. Retrieved from https://www.dropbox.com/s/c3zo0v7dax9g7go/IW%20AMS%20AES%202020.pdf?dl=0

Bayview Analytics. Retrieved from: https://www.bayviewanalytics.com/reports/digitaltextsinthetimeofcovid.pdf

Yee, G., Lorenz, M., Mehta, S., Andres, C., and Edward, H. (2020). COVID-19 impacts on UBC students survey report. The Alma Mater Society of UBC. Retrieved from https://www.ams.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/AMS_COVID-19_Survey_Report.pdf

Yee, G., Lorenz, M., Mehta, S., Andres, C., and Edward, H. (2020). 2020 Academic experience survey report. The Alma Mater Society of UBC. Retrieved from https://www.ams.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2020_aes_v2.pdf

Appendix A: Sample of Open and Freely Available Resources Used at UBC

Please help us make this list more complete: if you are using an open resource at UBC, please let us know!

Year	Term	Course	Impacted Enrolments	Link to Open Resource
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CHEM211	152	Analytical Chemistry
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC107	169	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC110	703	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC210	462	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC310	290	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC322	142	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents and AIspace: Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC 411	30	Introduction to Compiler Construction CPSC 411 Book
2020/21	Winter Term 2	CPSC422	109	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents
2020/21	Winter Term 2	MATH101	1563	CLP-2 Integral Calculus, various other free resources
2020/21	Winter Term 2	MATH105	1,341	Optimal, Integral, Likely: Optimization, Integral Calculus, and Probability for Students of Commerce and the Social Sciences (pdf)
2020/21	Winter Term 2	MATH200	295	CLP-3 Multivariable Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 2	MATH220	217	Book of Proof
2020/21	Winter Term 2	MATH317	217	CLP-4 Vector Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 2	PHIL220	110	forall x (UBC Edition)
2020/21	Winter Term 2	PHIL320	35	Sets, Logic, Computation: An Open Introduction to Metalogic (pdf)
2020/21	Winter Term 2	PHIL420	12	Incompleteness and Computability: An Open Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems
2020/21	Winter Term 2	PHYS 118	220	OpenStax: University Physics Vol 2 and part of Volume 3
2020/21	Winter Term 2	PSYC101	101	OpenStax Pscyhology
2020/21	Winter Term 2	PSYC308a	99	Principles of Social Psychology
2020/21	Winter Term 1-2	MATH110	207	Active Prelude to Calculus and Active Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	ATSC201	78	Practical Meteorology
2020/21	Winter Term 1	CLST105	458	Greek and Roman Myth CLST105 Primary Source Course Readings
2020/21	Winter Term 1	CHEM210	203	Analytical Chemistry 2.0
2020/21	Winter Term 1	CHEM250	128	Inorganic Chemistry for Chemical Engineers
2020/21	Winter Term 1	CPSC110	751	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Winter Term 1	CPSC210	603	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Winter Term 1	CPSC322	177	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents and AIspace: Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence
2020/21	Winter Term 1	EOSC110	108	Physical Geology
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH100	1606	CLP-I Differential Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH104	1,138	CLP-I Differential Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH120	51	CLP-I Differential Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH180	225	CLP-I Differential Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH190	67	Choice of Multiple resources: • CLP-1 Differential Calculus • Contemporary Calculus • Single Variable Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH200	1041	CLP-3 Multivariable Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH210	187	https://www.math.ubc.ca/~pwalls/math-python/
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH215	155	Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH217	101	CLP-3 Multivariable Calculus and CLP-4 Vector Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH220	454	Book of Proof
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH221	633	Interactive Linear Algebra (UBC edition)
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH253	633	CLP-3 Multivariable Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH255	203	Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH317	137	CLP-4 Vector Calculus
2020/21	Winter Term 1	MATH344	77	Game Theory, Alive
2020/21	Winter Term 1	PHIL220	135	forall x (UBC Edition)
2020/21	Winter Term 1	PHIL322	11	Boxes and Diamonds: An Open Introduction to Modal Logic
2020/21	Winter Term 1	PHYS100	232	OpenStax College Physics
2020/21	Winter Term 1	PHYS117	448	OpenStax University Physics,  Vol 1
2020/21	Winter Term 1	PSYC102	0	OpenStax Pscyhology and the Noba Project Introduction to Psychology
2020/21	Winter 1-2	Science One	92	Math Section: CLP-1 Differential Calculus; Biology Section: Mix of open resources including: Learn Genetics, Scitable, MedLinePlus Chromosomes & mtDNAUBC, Understanding Evolution, and Instructor and student resources
2020/21	Summer Term 2	CLST105	110	Greek and Roman Myth CLST105 Primary Source Course Readings
2020/21	Summer Term 2	CPSC210	154	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2020/21	Summer Term 1-2	PHYS100	148	OpenStax College Physics
2020/21	Summer Term 1	CPSC110	148	https://www.edx.org/micromasters/ubcx-software-development
2020/21	Summer Term 1	CPSC322	91	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents and AIspace: Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence
2020/21	Summer Term 1	MATH100	140	CLP-I Differential Calculus
2020/21	Summer Term 1	MATH220	59	Book of Proof
2020/21	Summer Term 1	MATH215/255	60	Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers
2020/21	Summer Term 1	PSYC101	367	OpenStax Pscyhology
2020/21	Summer Term 1	PSYC102	333	OpenStax Pscyhology

Appendix B: OER Samples from Previous Academic Years