What is Open Education?
Open education encompasses resources, tools, and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness. Open activities supported by the TLEF include:- The adoption, adaptation, and creation of OER. OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of access barriers, and which often carry legal permission which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource.
- The adoption of open education pedagogies and practices that leverage UBC’s open technologies and OER to allow for flexible, authentic, student-centered, and accessible learning.
Open Education is Increasing at UBC Since 2011, more than 47,000 UBC students have enrolled in courses in which instructors used OER instead of traditional textbooks. At least $4.7 to $6.7 million dollars have been saved by students in these courses and these figures are increasing each year. Read more…
Examples of Open Education Projects Funded by the TLEF
- Building Digital Citizenship and Critical Digital Literacies in French Program Teacher Candidates through Open Educational Repositories This project aims to provide French teacher candidates with the necessary skills and resources to effectively create and share resources in alignment with the revised B.C. Curriculum and Digital Literacy Framework. Faculty of Education; Yvonne Dawydiak
- Open ChemE: Increasing authentic student learning through open educational resources This project aims to increase authentic student learning through the curation, development, and provisioning of openly available multi-media chemical engineering resources. Additionally, students will build upon these educational resources. Faculty of Applied Science; Jonathan Verrett
- SoilWeb200: Open Resource for Authentic Student Learning One objective of the project is to enhance use of an open soil educational resource by embedding open pedagogies that allow authentic knowledge creation and encourage students to connect course content with real-world applications. Faculty of Land and Food Systems; Maja Krzic
- UBC Anatomy: an open access online repository of modular anatomy content for integration across curricula In this project, faculty and students from across UBC will collaborate to create a comprehensive set of resources to support anatomy education in all UBC programs. Faculty of Medicine; Claudia Krebs
- UBC Library Support for Open Textbook and Open Educational Resource (OER) Creation The UBC Library will assist faculty in creating, adapting, or adopting open textbooks and OERs. The goal is to produce up to 8 open textbooks across subject disciplines. UBC Library; Leonora Crema
- Sustainability Case Studies: A Model for Interdisciplinary Learning and Showcasing of Student Work This project brings together faculty and students from across departments and Faculties to co-create an interdisciplinary, open educational resource on sustainability and environmental ethics. Faculty of Arts and UBC AMS; Christina Hendricks
- Tapestry: Enabling Interactive, Remixable, Reusable, and Extensible Open Educational Modules This project proposes to build a new tool, called Tapestry (tapestry-tool.com), that will enable a novel development model for online course content: One that is learner-centered, constructivist, and emphasizes student-faculty co-creation and reusability. Tapestry will allow for the production of interactive, remixable, reusable, and extensible educational modules. Faculty of Arts, Steven Barnes
The TLEF is Funded By Students
The TLEF is financed through a portion of the student tuition paid to UBC Vancouver. According to the 2016 AMS Student Experience Survey (pdf), nearly 75% of students have not bought a course text due to cost at least once and 37% reported. Access to educational materials is an important topic for students as they often or frequently go without textbooks or resources due to cost. Open educational resources and practices can help close those access barriers.Please note: Open UBC Snapshots attempt to quantify and explore emerging trends in open educational practices at UBC. Please help us make this series more complete. If you are using open resources in your own teaching and learning or are aware of any open practices or adoptions on campus, please let us know!
This Open Snapshot was adapted from the TLEF and Open Education Poster presented at the TLEF Showcase. The original poster can be downloaded here.