OER Champions 2019

Name	Faculty	Project Details

Agnes d’Entremont	Applied Science	Working with Dr. Jonathan Verrett, Dr. Agnes d’Entremont has worked to develop and convert existing mathematics problem sets to WeBWorK, an open-source online homework delivery system. With Verrett, she converted 700 existing problems from the LMS to the Open Problem Library. Agnes says of the Open Problem Library, “My hope is that we plant a seed on the Open Problem Library. We’re starting several subjects that don’t exist there now. If 10 people build five problems each, suddenly we have this amazing resource that’s available to all of us.”
Bhushan Gopaluni	Applied Science	Dr. Bhushan Gopaluni is involved in the development of open chemical engineering resources across multiple courses, all of which support active learning through open-source and interactive course content in Jupyter Notebooks.
Andrew Owen	Arts	Dr. Andrew Owen understands the burden that textbook costs can place on students, and provides free and accessible course materials for his students to use. He puts in significant labour to create online educational modules with quizzes and more, meaning that course materials are not only available online, but interactive.
Azim Shariff	Arts	Dr. Azim Shariff has used an open resources (including quizzes from the Noba Projec) rather than a paid textbook with the 225 students section of Psych102.
Dave Gilbert	Arts	Dr. Dave Gilbert is currently working on a project that combines a revision to an open textbook for Logic (forallx, UBC edition by Jonathan Ichikawa) with Carnap, an open framework allowing for the development of online (in-browser) formal reasoning exercises and activities, as well as automated marking support, created by Professor Graham Leach-Krouse (Kansas State). This project will support courses that teach students to use semantic tableaux for proofs, and offers an open source, web-based application for exercises and marking support. This will allow students to save money not only on a textbook, but also on homework software that they might otherwise be asked to pay for.
David Gaertner	Arts	Dr. David Gaertner is leading the way for open education in First Nations and Indigenous Studies and educating his students on the implications of open knowledge. While Open Education finds more tensions in the humanities, Dr Gaertner has embraced this dialogue within his classroom by exploring traditional knowledge licenses vs. creative commons licenses.
Jon Beasley-Murray	Arts	Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray, Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of British Columbia, co-ordinated the Wikipedia educational project ‘Murder, Madness, and Mayhem’. The collective goals were to have students write a selection of articles on Latin American literature and bring the articles to featured article status (or as near as possible). By project’s end, after just one semester, they had promoted three articles to Featured Article status, eight to Good Article status, and one to B-Class status.
Kathryn Grafton	Arts	Dr. Kathryn Grafton has assigned a Wikipedia project in a Canadian Studies course, providing an excellent example of how students can get involved in revising and creating open educational resources. According to the Wiki Edu dashboard for the course, 45 student editors created 6 articles and revised 29 during the course.
Michael Byers	Arts	Dr. Michael Byers does not use textbooks in his class, and has created a class website with links to all course materials that he uses. He believes in open access, and using open education as a form of knowledge sharing, and is committed to eliminating course material costs for students.
M.V. Ramana	Arts	Dr. M.V. Ramana used videos, online quizzes, news sources, and many open access articles as course materials for his class. He is also an advocate for open access and open education, imparting to students the value of online materials in accessibility and assistance with learning, as well as for expanding scholarship.
Siobhán McPhee	Arts	Dr. Siobhán McPhee works with open and emerging technologies, such as creating augmented reality apps for her courses or engaging her students in creating open resources, to expand the boundaries of education.”I see education as the ultimate equalizer,” she said. “Open is about that ability to take education as it was in the past–a very elitist idea–and making it available to anyone who wants it.”
Uma Kumar	Arts	Dr. Uma Kumar made a significant effort to create a learning environment that would be accessible to every student regardless of their socio-economic status in her GERM 426 class by ensuring the course work readings were all made available online.
Surita Jhangiani	Education	Dr. Surita Jhangiani is a co-author on the first publishsed study of student perceptions of open textbooks in British Columbia (“Investigating the Perceptions, Use and Impact of Open Textbooks: A Survey of Postsecondary Students in British Columbia,” International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2017). Surita is also on the Open UBC Working Group and is involved in planning workshops on OER at UBC in this academic year.
Janette Bulkan	Forestry	Dr. Janette Bulkan has been involved with the Open Case Studies project since its beginning in 2016. She has involved students in several of her courses in writing case studies about forestry and forest practices in many countries. She is also participating in a scholarship of teaching and learning research project studying students’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of writing case studies that are publicly accessible with an open license.
Duncan McHugh	Land and Food Systems	Duncan McHugh has been promoting Open Education for over 10 years in his class LFS400 and in the dozens workshops he has done in Land and Food Systems and for the rest of the campus. Not only does Duncan articulate the value of Open, Open Education and OERs, he also includes knowledgeable insight into intellectual property and the creation of content. He also models best practices through his use of open tools and resources. Duncan serves as a resource and advocate within the faculty for other instructors and makes the option of adopting open principles possible for many faculty members, instructors, teaching assistants and students.
Judy Chan	Land and Food Systems	Judy Chan’s Food, Nutrition and Health 200 course has involved students in creating open educational resources in Wikipedia-style articles on particular foods and posted them with a Creative Commons license on the UBC Wiki and in edited or created articles on specific foods on Wikipedia.
Sandra Brown	Land and Food Systems	Dr. Brown has used open resources in her courses as well as engaged in open pedagogies, such as asking her students to engage in Wikipedia edit-a-thons to add valuable knowledge science to the public domain.
Jon Festinger, Q.C.	Law	Jon Festinger has long been a thinker, advocate, and champion for open education at UBC. He created some of the earliest and longest running examples of open courses at UBC by sharing all class processes and content (including lectures) openly online and under a Creative Commons licenses. He engages his students in open pedagogy by encouraging them to create and share their work openly as well. According to Festinger, having an open course “allows for that lasting value and it doesn’t turn the virtues of learning into something that is cloistered, that is circumscribed, that is narrow…The whole notion of teachers and students is predicated on the notion that there is knowledge to be shared. Anything that constrains the sharing of knowledge is not a good thing for education, and arguably, it’s not a good thing for humanity.”
Dean Giustini	Library, Archival and Information Studies	For 10+ years, Dean Giustini created an internationally-recognized and respected open source of information for information professionals on health librarianship (HLWiki). His Health Librarian WIKI (now retired) was a knowledgeable and dependable source for both national and international information professionals.
Claudia Krebs	Medicine	Dr. Claudia Krebs teaches neuroanatomy and gross anatomy at UBC and has created high quality open educational resources for neuroscience and anatomy for UBC and the global community. These resources include syllabi, videos e-books, online modules, and interactive web materials. According to Dr. Krebs, “The more an institution opens itself to the world the better it is for the institution. The more we are aware of the challenges that other universities have and the more we can reach out and collaborate as partners to work on global issues, such as access to information and access to education, the better it is for everyone”
Alan Mackworth	Science	Prof. Mackworth has created a free online textbook as well as a site full of related openly licensed resources (AIspace.org). These freely available materials are used to teach Artificial Intelligence across several courses at UBC.
Andrew Rechnitzer	Science	Dr. Andrew Rechnitzer is one of the three faculty members in Mathematics behind the CLP series of free online texts used by thousands of UBC students every year. These top-quality resources are the primary references in the 4-stage calculus sequence MATH 100, 101, 200, 317. The authors prepared them on their own initiative, out of love for the subject and compassion for students, with no thought of recognition and virtually no resources from UBC. Dr. Rechnitzer is an early adopter and creator of open textbooks at UBC. He has replaced paid textbooks in the courses that he teaches and is one of the authors of the CLP open calculus textbooks. He also advocates and develops innovative open source platforms for marking and assessment that saves fees for students. Screen reader support enabled.
Cristina Conati	Science	Prof. Conati teaches CPSC322 which uses a freely available online textbook and openly licensed site with resources rather than paid materials.
David Poole	Science	Prof. Poole has created a free online textbook as well as a site full of related openly licensed resources (AIspace.org). These freely available materials are used to teach Artificial Intelligence across several courses at UBC.
Elyse Yeager	Science	Dr. Elyse Yeager is one of the three faculty members in Mathematics behind the CLP series of free online texts used by thousands of UBC students every year. These top-quality resources are the primary references in the 4-stage calculus sequence MATH 100, 101, 200, 317. The authors prepared them on their own initiative, out of love for the subject and compassion for students, with no thought of recognition and virtually no resources from UBC.
Eric Cytrynbaum	Science	Dr. Eric Cytrynbaum has been in charge of MATH 102, and has set up the entire course to run on open content. Along with using his colleague Dr. Leah Keshet’s textbook, Dr. Cytrynbaum developed a large selection of open-ended homework problems, drawing on his background in mathematical biology to connect pure mathematics with relevant applications. He has also adopted the free homework system WeBWork and carefully curating a course wiki to provide openly-accessible materials to students.
Georg Rieger	Science	Dr. Georg Rieger worked with colleagues to adapt an Open Stax Physics textbook that they put into an edX site for a first-year physics course. They not only saved students money by doing so, but also customized the book to better fit the course. Stefan was one of the authors of a research study on student perceptions and use of the open textbook for that course: The Adoption of an Open Textbook in a Large Physics Course: An Analysis of Cost, Outcomes, Use and Perceptions (International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2017).
Giuseppe Carenini	Science	Prof. Carenini teaches several courses that use freely available online textbook and open resources rather than paid materials.
Gregor Kiczales	Science	Prof. Kiczales has long been a champion of using open and freely accessible learning materials at UBC. In his courses, he has always used an open educational resources including an open textbook and, more recently, he has had developed open access MOOCs, and used those open materials in his courses. According to Prof. Kiczales “In education, open means learners won’t have to pay for the materials, and it means that instructors can build on each other’s work to create better and better learning.”
Jaclyn Stewart	Science	Dr. Jaclyn Stewart has involved students in adapting material from several open textbooks for chemistry to create a new open textbook for an organic chemistry course, which will be published on the Pressbooks platform.
Joel Feldman	Science	Dr. Joel Feldman, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, and one of the three faculty members in Mathematics behind the CLP series of free online texts used by thousands of UBC students every year. These top-quality resources are the primary references in the 4-stage calculus sequence MATH 100, 101, 200, 317. The authors prepared them on their own initiative, out of love for the subject and compassion for students, with no thought of recognition and virtually no resources from UBC.
Leah Keshet	Science	Dr. Leah Keshet has written two textbooks for first- and second-semester calculus for the life sciences. This textbook has been used in MATH 102 for three years now, with a yearly enrolment of about 1,000 students. With the text in a fairly stable, finalized state, she spent last summer engaging recent Math 102 alumni, leading undergraduate students through developing even more open resources, including homework problems and solutions.
Marcello Pavan	Science	Dr. Pavan is an early adopter of using open textbooks in his PHYS100 courses – he had used open textbooks in place of paid textbooks for several years.
Patrick Walls	Science	Dr. Patrick Walls uses open resources in his teaching and has supported the use of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web application that assists in the sharing of open resources that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text, at UBC.
Reid Holmes	Science	Dr. Reid Holmes has done outstanding research into teaching application-based software development for many years, including using OERSon a a publicly available github page. Dr. Dragos Ghioca has adopted only CLP open textbooks in his math courses, and takes an active role in pointing students to free-accessible studying resources.
Roland Stull	Science	Dr. Stull is a longtime creator and user of open resources in his teaching. His open textbook, Practical Meteorology, was one of the earliest open textbooks created and used at UBC as well as many other institutions. Dr. Stull also teaches ATSC113 a distance education course, which is almost entirely open.
Russ Algar	Science	Dr. Algar is a long time user of open resources. He has implemented an open textbook in his Chemistry course and co-developed the Alchemy online teaching and learning tool, which is open access at UBC.
Seckin Demirbas	Science	Dr. Demirbas is currently working on a free Introduction to Proofs textbook, for Math 200, together with Andrew Rechnitzer, a course which has several hundred enrollees each year.
Simon Bates	Science	As both an instructor and as the Associate Provost, Teaching & Learning, Dr. Simon Bates has been a huge leader and supporter of open resources at UBC-V. He has used open textbooks in his courses, created open problem libraries to share assessment materials, and has engaged in open assignments and projects in which his students created valuable learning resources. More so, he has championed polices and funding support for open education that has helped make “open” a strong practice at UBC.
Stefan Reinsberg	Science	Dr. Stefan Reinsberg worked with colleagues to adapt an Open Stax Physics textbook that they put into an edX site for a first-year physics course. They not only saved students money by doing so, but also customized the book to better fit the course. Stefan was one of the authors of a research study on student perceptions and use of the open textbook for that course: The Adoption of an Open Textbook in a Large Physics Course: An Analysis of Cost, Outcomes, Use and Perceptions (International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2017).
Barbara Lee	Social Work	Dr. Barbara Lee, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, is developing a comprehensive open online educational toolkit that includes lecture materials, virtual simulation videos, and student assessments and evaluation frameworks for instructors to use in training social work students working with children and families.
Christina Hendricks	CTLT	Dr. Christina Hendricks has worked with the UBC student government to help implement their textbook broke campaigns as well as assist in helping them to achieve the first open policy statement in a tenure-track agreement at UBC. She is an advocate of open practice within her own work and is currently developing a series of open textbooks for Introduction to Philosophy courses, published with the support of the Rebus Community.
Jeff Miller	CTLT	Jeff Miller has been an advocate for open education and open practices in his work supporting the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund as well as more broadly at the institution. He has been instrumental in helping to set up the OER Fund, in collaboration with others at CTLT, the AMS, and the UBC Library, and also promotes open practices within CTLT where feasible. He is an enthusiastic advocate for open education and someone who makes connections between people and projects to help move the dial in the university more broadly.
Lucas Wright	CTLT	Lucas Wright has supported and advocated for open education at UBC Vancouver for many years. He was one of the creators and facilitators of the Teaching with WordPress open online course that ran in 2015 Lucas also created a website with short activities that were used in a number of open education workshops at CTLT, the Open for Learning Challenge Bank. He is an active member of the Open UBC working group, and continues to design and facilitate multiple workshops about OER and open educational practices at UBC and elsewhere.
Novak Rogic	CTLT	Novak Rogic has advocated for, implemented, designed, and supported both UBC Blogs and the UBC Wiki both of which have served the entire UBC audience for over a decade. Both platforms have been widely used by every Faculty and nearly all departments and allow faculty, staff, and importantly, students to create and maintain vast amounts of open materials. He has also been invited to speak and many wiki-related events and conferences around the world.
Richard Tape	CTLT	Richard Tape has been instrumental in developing and supporting functionality on WordPress for teaching and learning, including supporting faculty who have used UBC Blogs to make their course materials publicly available. He cares deeply about ensuring that educational technology supports effective, inclusive and accessible learning: among other things, he is an advocate not only for open education, but also for ensuring that course materials and websites meet digital accessibility standards.
Rie Namba	CTLT	Rie Namba has supported open education at UBC Vancouver through her technical and web design work, such as on the redesigned Open UBC website, the Digital Tattoo site, as well as the UBC Wiki. Rie consults with and supports many faculty and staff using WordPress and Wiki, and who are incorporating open educational practices.
Will Engle	CTLT	As the open education strategist for CTLT, Will has worked tirelessly in support of open education and open pedagogy in UBC courses. He has supported a number of open enabled classes, including the development of Wikipedia-based activities. He is one of the original Open UBC working group members and has partnered with the Library, the Bookstore, and the AMS to advance open on campus by supporting events and workshops that spread the word on campus about open practice.
Deb Chen	VPRI	Deb Chen has been working on the Open Case Studies project since 2017, first as a graduate student assistant and then as a staff member at CTLT. She worked directly with faculty members interested in participating to brainstorm how they might use, adapt, or create open case studies in their courses. She has been the main coordinator of a research project studying student perceptions of writing case studies for a public audience.
Erin Fields	UBC Library	Erin Fields has been an Open champion on campus for many years and has been integral to several open initiatives. Most recently she has volunteered significant time and energy to help get the recently announced OER Fund off the ground. She has also been an important “connector” at UBC – helping to bring people from different parts of the University together to work on Open initiatives. Part of this work involves planning and running several events (Open Access Week events, Open Scholarship in Practice, Open Education Week). A lot of this work is behind the scenes, but is integral to growing awareness and support for Open on campus and beyond.