OER Champions 2020

Name	Faculty	Details
Jonathan Verrett	Applied Science	Dr. Jonathan Verrett shows a deep committment to providing free and open access to resources developed within a public university setting. Working with Dr. Agnes d’Entremont, Jonathan has worked to develop and convert existing mathematics problem sets to WeBWorK, an open-source online homework delivery system. With dEntremont, he also converted 700 existing problems from the LMS to the Open Problem Library. Additionally, through a TLEF funded project, Jonathan incorporated open pedagogy and authentic student learning through the curation, development, and provisioning of openly available multi-media resources for CHBE 241, where students were asked to edit and update resources as a part of their course work.
Suzanne Campbell	Applied Science	Suzanne Campbell is an early adopter of innovative teaching methodologies, including simulations and open practices. An ethusiastic intructor that believes in making education accessible, she is working on an open educational resources for lactation education.
Anders Kraal	Arts	Dr. Kraal ensures that the required readings for his courses are freely accessible for students.
Ben Cheung	Arts	Dr. Ben Cheung has been an advocate for Open Education on campus for many years. He uses open textbooks in his class, contributes to open literature, and raises awareness for OER implementation across campus. In Dr. Cheung’s own words: “Not only is this open textbook comparable to others in terms of quality, but it also gives me more freedom and control as an educator over what goes into the course and what students take away from the instruction.”
Elena Zampieri	Arts	Elena Zampieri accomodated classes equitably during COVID by making sure all students had fair and available access to course resources irrespective of bandwidth, timezone, or content restriction challenges.
Heather Robertson	Arts	Dr. Robertson makes certain that students have access to course materials by building her required reading lists using open access materials.
Jonathan Ichikawa	Arts	Dr. Jonathan Ichikawa’s text (co-authored by Dr. Magnus of SUNY Albany), forall x, was developed with significant student input and feedback through its use in PHIL 220, a large-enrolment course taken by undergraduates in many degree programs. The text forms the backbone for a course taught using pedagogy designed to engage students as they wrestle with difficult concepts during class. The success of his students in wrestling with complex topics speaks to the care taken by Dr. Ichikawa in creating and using open resources that engage successfully so many students in the study of logic.
Kurtis Peters	Arts	Dr. Peters cares a lot about student access to textbooks and ensure that his course materials list contains openly accessible content.
Loch Brown	Arts	Dr. Brown has made a commitment to open learning by always providing open source materials for all of his classes is currently putting together an open source textbook. He goes above and beyond to provide his students with accessible resources and explains the value of open sourced learning in all of his classes.
Mark Turin	Arts	Dr. Mark Turin is a devoted advocate for open learning. He uses open educational resources whenever possible, creates opportunities for producing open access materials, and encourages students and scholars alike to think about how information is shared and with whom. In the courses he teaches at UBC, he uses 95% open educational resources. He edits the World Oral Literature Series for Open Book Publishers (OBP), where he also serves on the Editorial and Advisory Board. He has also been instrumental in creating open access archives in the form of the World Oral Literature Project, a global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literature, and Digital Himalaya, which archives and makes available ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. In his work at the UBC Himalaya Program, he has helped to oversee the creation of open courses for Nepali and Tibetan languages. Dr. Turin is admired by his colleagues and students alike for his deep engagement with the issues of voice, representation, and equity which are at the heart of open access.
Michael Schandorf	Arts	Michael Schandorf recognizes that expensive texts and software pose unnecessary financial barriers for students, and works to ensure that course materials are free and accessible to all students in his courses.
Sabina Magliocco	Arts	Dr. Sabina Magliocco reduced financial burdens on her students in her RGST200/ANTH202 course by ensuring that the learning materials were free and accessible for all. She also regularly shared open resources for additional learning and barrier-free mental health resources to support students during this challenging time.
Simon Lolliot	Arts	Dr. Simon Lolliot has been an early adopter of using open textbooks rather than paid textbooks in multiple yearsof the courses he teaches. His use of OERs has had a huge impact and cost saving for students (including eliminating textbook fees for more than 800 students one year).
Siobhán McElduff	Arts	Dr. Siobhán McElduff has created several open textbooks. Most recently, she worked with a team of CNERS students (Grace Guy, Danielle Lee, Keith Warner-Harder, James McKintrick, Sophie Roth, and Luoyao Zhang) to launch UnRoman Romans, an OER that brings together ancient sources on social outsiders in the Roman empire. This online anthology of sources explores depictions of those who did not fit in or were stigmatized in ancient Rome, from sexual minorities to ethnic groups to entertainers and beyond. Students in her CLST360E course later added to the project, each authoring a section or entry in the textbook. The book is an excellent resource on Romanitas in antiquity for individuals within or outside of the university, and a wonderful example of open pedagogy in action.
Somayeh Kamranian	Arts	Dr. Somayeh Kamranian is passionate about open pedagogy and seeks to learn both with and from her students. As part of her commitment to open education, Dr. Kamranian recently published Let’s Read French Books, an open textbook that aims to make learning French easier and more engaging for students by using public domain 19th century French literature. Alongside the text, she includes activities, glossaries and on-demand definitions that engage learners and make reading French fun, exciting and enriching.
Steven Barnes	Arts	Dr. Steven Barnes is a committed advocate of making education accessible. He has removed barriers to learning by using open textbooks in his courses in place of paid textbooks, designed a number of open online courses, and has pioneered open technologies to support open pedagogy and OER development. He has created a large body of stop-motion animations that deal with challenging topics for students of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, and because they are freely accessible on YouTube, they have been used by instructors around the world.
Zorana Svedic	Business	Dr. Svedic and Dr. Cavusoglu ensured that the course textbook and required software for their Information Systems course were freely available to all students. In a technically demanding course, where the cost of books and homework tools can routinely exceed hundreds of dollars, they demonstrated that expensive materials are unnecessary for students to have a high-quality learning experience.
Amy Metcalfe	Education	Dr. Metcalfe has been a very active proponent of the use of OERs at UBC in particular and academia in general. She includes topics related to open access publishing, open educational resources, and creative commons licenses in her courses and invites guest speakers to share their knowledge and expertise on those topics. Currently, she has been working on a project which builds awareness of departmental open educational practices and materials through a wiki-based directory of OER created by EDST students and faculty, and interviews EDST students and faculty about their use of, interest in, or critiques of open pedagogy, open access publication, and open educational resources, to be distributed online as a podcast series in 2020-2021. In her professional practice, she has made a move towards publishing dominantly in open access journals and, wherever possible, make her work accessible.
Fernanda Tomaselli	Forestry	Dr. Tomaselli builds her course materials list making sue that everything is free to access and comes in a variety of formats.
Maja Krzic	Land and Food Systems	Dr. Krzic is a co-editor of an open access E-textbook under development for Introduction to Soil Science, a course taken by 300 students annually at UBC alone. Currently textbooks written for the USA are commonly used. Maja and her co-editor are leading a team of 36 authors from across Canada in writing chapters. In addition to funding from the Canadian Society of Soil Science, Dr. Krzic secured funding from BCcampus. Currently there is no Canadian-based textbook that provides an introduction to soil science; and this initiative is an OER available to instructors or students without cost, and with an open license allowing for reuse, revision, and redistribution.
Matthew Mitchell	Land and Food Systems	Dr. Matthew Mitchell ensures that the extensive course materials in LFS 250 are all free and accessible to students, and deploys a range of media to engage students, including virtual tours of the UBC and BC dairy farms.
Heather O’Brien	Library, Archival and Information Studies	Dr. O’Brien is leading on the STOREE project (Supporting Transparent and Open Research Engagement and Exchange) with UBC Library, Simon Fraser University (SFU) Library, UBC Learning Exchange and the BC Centre for Substance Use. STOREE is funded by SSHRC and has three major goals: Leverage initiatives to improve access to research for non-academic affiliated people and groups; Design and implement engaging and accessible ways to disseminate research; and support researchers, librarians, literacy educators and community organizations around transparent, reciprocal and accessible research practices and societal participation. Dr. O’Brien is also a member of the Making Research Accessible Initiative (MRAi) Steering Committee led by the UBC Learning Exchange and UBC Library, which recently launched the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal, an online resource for academic and community-based research about issues affecting the DTES community. As a faculty member in the UBC iSchool, she teaches the Scholarly Communication and Publishing course, which focuses on topics including scholarly publishing, open access, copyright, knowledge exchange, and research impact.
Chelsea Himsworth	Medicine	Seeing a gap in resources available to her students, Dr. Himsworth began a project in 2019 to develop a science communication open textbook that focused on communication of risk in the scientific context. Working from the first version of the text, Dr. Himsworth is now incorporating open pedagogy into the textbooks construction using student developed content and improving the experience of the textbook through investigating interactives.
Mike Marin	Medicine	Mike Marin is a leader in open education and is committed to making learning accessible for all. He runs a YouTube channel where he has posted over a hundred lecture-style videos covering topics in which he is a subject matter expert. Subjects of his videos include hypothesis testing, bootstrapping, univariate and multivariate analysis, and R programming. These videos have been integrated into the core statistical methods course for MSc students in the School of Population and Public Health, “Statistics for Health Research,” and have greatly enhanced the learning of students grappling with distant and online education necessitated by the current pandemic. In addition to these online videos, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, Mike has also made extensive module notes available free of charge, meaning students are not required to purchase expensive textbooks.
Greg Martin	Science	Dr. Greg Martin has taken efforts to provide students taking Math 120 have access to course materials which are free of cost, as well as using WeBWorK open problem sets.
Mark Thomson Mac Lean	Science	Mark MacLean is one of many instructors in the UBC Math department who use open resources and textbooks in their courses. He’s stated that the department efforts around OER have focused not just on cost, but also on the benefits to student learning. “We feel like, in certain courses, that we don’t need one of these expensive textbooks to support student learning to the level we know we can.”
Mike Gelbart	Science	Dr. Mike Gelbart is a vocal proponent of open education resources. In his role as Option Co-Director of the UBC MDS program, Dr. Gelbart has advocated for the open release of the syllabi for all Master of Data Science courses, along with lecture notes and labs, under the CC-BY-SA license (https://github.com/UBC-MDS/public). He makes videos of his course lectures freely available, and provides help and support to his colleagues in transforming their own courses to incorporate open education resources.
Tiffany Timbers	Science	Dr. Tiffany Timbers is an Option Co-Director of the UBC Master of Data Science program, and is a committed proponent for developing and using open textbooks in her courses. She has authored or co-authored two open textbooks that are released under the Creative Commons license: Introduction to Data Science and Python Packages. Dr. Timbers has also advocated for the open release of syllabi for all Master of Data Science courses, along with lecture notes and labs for many other courses, which she makes freely available on GitHub under a CC-BY-SA license. Overall, this is a tremendous effort and shows a sustained dedication to OER.
Tracy Kion	Science	Dr. Tracy Kion ensures that the required readings for her courses are freely accessible for students.
Trevor Campbell	Science	Dr. Campbell has collaborated with his colleagues Dr. Tiffany-Anne Timers and Melissa Lee to develop an open textbook for his Introduction to Data Science course at UBC. His students greatly benefit from this freely accessible resource, which allows course instructors to nimbly revise and update the text to keep up with new developments in this rapidly growing field.
Vishakha Monga	Science	Dr. Monga developed an open textbook, Inorganic Chemistry for Chemical Engineers, for CHEM 250, an interdisciplinary inorganic chemistry course. She is committed to increasing the accessibility of her resources and improving student learning with an open approach.
William Mohn	Science	Dr. Mohn uses open textbooks and freely available recorded lectures in his courses to ensure that all students can access materials without financial barriers.