This week, we hear from Simon Bates, UBC’s Associate Provost, Teaching and Learning.
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What motivated you do adopt/adapt/create open educational resources in your work?Cost primarily, but also quality., I was keenly aware that we were asking students to pay well over $100 each for the course materials, and I had some reservations about the quality of the online question bank. So I knew we could do cheaper, I also thought we could probably do better.
Can you tell us about the open education projects you have been working on?
Well… there are several! We’ve adopted the OpenStax calculus physics textbook for my first year Physics course, we’ve created a curated problem bank for instructors (now with over 500 questions in it) since the course started. Last year, we developed a series of metacognitive readers for each chapter of the text book, which are themselves openly licenses. They cover key concepts, sticking points and connections to material elsewhere in the course, a sort of ‘Coles Notes’ for each chapter. And then finally, this year, we are moving the content from a paid online homework system we have been using for a few years alongside the OpenStax texts and bringing the material into Canvas, so the course will be zero cost to students next year (apart from needing a clicker). All of these projects were done in collaboration with a team of students who had previously taken the course.
What benefits have you seen from using open educational resources in the classroom?
Students definitely appreciate the cost savings, so that is a very visible and tangible benefit to them. But I also think that there’s a benefit because we’re not just building content, but we’re building infrastructure as well, or approaches, which can be picked up and used by other people.
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
The textbook is very comprehensive (students would probably say ‘wordy’ or ‘too detailed’!) so there’s a challenge in helping students at a first year level to gauge what is really important and foundational in the text and what is there for interest, additional examples etc. The metacognitive readers were our attempt to try and help students navigate through many hundred pages of text associated with the material for the course.
Do you have any advice for other faculty developing OER?
Start small and build. You don’t need to change everything in one go; take an element of your course and work on that, be it a type of assessment (eg weekly quizzes) or content for a particular module of area. And the second thing I would say is where you can, make students partners in the enterprise; I am continually overwhelmed by how many of the students who take my class are interested in working to develop it further for future cohorts.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about OER at UBC?
We have an incredible strength in depth of faculty and staff engaged in this work across UBC, it is growing to be quite a movement. I am proud to have been able to play a role in advocating for the development of open resources to be supported and resourced at UBC, particularly through the $1M commitment over the next 4 years from the Academic Excellence funds.
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Thank you Simon for taking the time to participate!
To hear more from Simon, check out his One-On-One interview.
