UBC Library Open Education Impact & Activity Report
2021/2022
UBC Library’s Open Education services seek to support the UBC community in finding, adapting, and creating high-quality open educational resources, as well as planning and implementing innovative Open Education projects and Open Practices.
UBC Library’s Open Education services play an active role in moving forward UBC Vancouver Library’s Strategic Framework vision of,
…leading and collaborating to advance open scholarship…
Additionally, the supports and services for open education reinforce UBC Okanagan Library’s commitment to,
… support(ing) transformative learning experiences.
The following report was developed by Erin Fields, Open Education & Scholarly Communications Librarian (Vancouver Campus) and Donna Langille, Community Engagement and Open Education Librarian (Okanagan Campus) to highlight UBC Library’s combined impact on open educational practices at UBC for 2021/2021.
- Consults & Programs
- Partnerships & Collaborations
- Special Projects
- Professional Engagement
- Campus Initaitves
The core of UBC Library’s open education program is our focus on helping and supporting faculty, students, and staff in their open practices.
This year saw a marked increase in consultation requests.
Total Consultations 2021/2022: 165
Consultations by Campus & Department
Okanagan Departments
- School of Engineering UBCO (7)
- Irving K Barber School of Sciences UBCO (5)
- Irving K Barber School of Arts and Social Sciences (5)
- Creative and Critical Studies UBCO (4)
- Interdisciplinary Studies – Environmental Stream (1)
Vancouver Departments
- Arts (56)
- Faculty of Medicine (28)
- Other (21)
- Applied Science (14)
- Forestry (8)
- Sciences (6)
- Faculty of Education (6)
- Land and Food Systems (4)
- UBC Employees (3)
- Law, (2)
- Pharmaceutical Sciences (2)
- Community and Regional Planning (1)
- Kinesiology (1)
- Library and Archival Studies (1)
Number of Open Education Consultations by Type
UBC Library organized 26 events with 587 participants to build awareness and advocate for open practices and resources on campus. Sessions included topics on creating OER using digital tools (e.g. Pressbooks, Scalar etc.), open licensing, sharing and discoverability of OER, and open pedagogy.
Indigenous Knowledges and Open Education Symposium
193 participants
The Open Education and Indigenous Knowledges Symposium focused on Indigenous ways of knowing, culture, experiences, and worldviews within our OE advocacy work. Kayla Lar-Son, Indigenous Programs and Services Librarian, Xwi7xwa Library, provided a keynote lecture on Open Education and Ethical Consideration for Indigenous Knowledges. The keynote was followed by a panel presentation with Indigenous faculty and staff from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and Okanagan College.
A Conversation on Open Access with Leslie Chan
57 participants
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) offered a hopeful vision for the future of scholarly communication in which scholars would use the internet to take back the means of academic production and provide free, unrestricted access to scholarly outputs. This session offered participants a conversation with Leslie Chan, an original signatory of the BOAI, to investigate the history of the open access movement from BOAI to today and what steps to take in the future to work towards the original promise of an equitable, scholar-led communication and research landscape.
UBC Library works with many internal and external partners in providing open education services, training, and advocacy. The following are highlights of collaborations that have had a significant impact on open education awareness and advocacy efforts this year.
UBC OER Collection
Developed in partnership with the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), UBC Library and UBC Okanagan Library, the UBC OER Collection is a new curated database full of openly accessible teaching and learning materials. The UBC OER Collection showcases UBC open educational resources (OER) in a searchable interface to support both UBC faculty and the general community in incorporating open educational resources and practices into their curriculum.
The collection was launched March 7, 2022 and currently houses 49 OER developed by UBC faculty, students, and staff.
In addition to the development of the collection, the Library and CTLT worked with the UBC Vancouver Alma Mater Society and Student’s Union UBC Okanagan to offer a multi-campus challenge to upload OER to the collection.
The winners were HIVE – Hackspace of Innovation and Visualization in Education (UBC Vancouver Faculty of Medicine) and Open Problem Bank for Physics (UBC Okanagan Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Engineering).
Watch the video to learn how to find resources and submit your own to the UBC OER Collection. Transcript [Word File]
OER Champions Recognition Awards
In partnership with the UBC Vancouver Alma Mater Society, Student’s Union UBC Okanagan, the VP Academic and Provost, and CTLT, the OER Champions Recognition Awards recognize individuals who have made a significant contribution to the use of open educational resources (OER) at UBC.
UBC Vancouver recognized 56 faculty and staff members and their OER efforts in an event hosted at the Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre. Faculty and staff members enjoyed an evening of speakers and socializing with other open education advocates.
Students’ Union Okanagan of UBC, in collaboration with the Open Education Working Group, led its first Open Champions event in April 2021. Through a series of social media posts, the SUO recognized 7 faculty, staff members, and students, each who have made significant contributions to Open Education at UBC Okanagan.
UBC Library supports open educational resource projects by faculty, including creating, finding, and sharing processes. The following highlights the projects supported by the library in 2021/2022.
Open Texts
UBC Library offered support and training for 11 projects creating OER, including technical support for Pressbooks, an open text publisher.
In support of sharing and discoverability of UBC community-created Pressbook texts, UBC Library created the Open UBC Open Text Catalogue. The texts in the catalogue were made with support from UBC Library open education service. The collection currently houses 9 texts, 5 of which were developed in 2020-2021, including:
Don’t Rock the Boat: A Facilitators Guide to Research-based Theatre & Graduate Student Well-Being
Faculty Lead: Susan Cox
Published: October 2021
968 Visitors (October 2021- March 2022)
Rock the Boat is an open-access multimedia resource designed to provoke dialogue about graduate supervision relationships within universities, and their impact on student and faculty wellbeing.
Exploring Climate Change and Mental Health
Lead: Natania Abebe, MSN/MPH(c), BScN, RN
Published: March 2022
987 Visitors (March 2022-June 2022)
This toolkit is designed for use by educators to empower students to think critically about the structural and socio-political inequities that affect them while centering on climate change and mental health through embedded reflective exercises.
Current/Upcoming Projects
- The Writing Place (Pending publication August 2022)
- Decolonizing the Engineering Curriculum (Pending publication August 2022)
- Practicing and Presenting Social Research (Pending publication August 2022)
- Understanding Wildfires (Pending publication August 2022)
- Pathology: From the Tissue Level to Clinical Manifestations and Inter-professional Care
- Introduction to Engineering Thermodynamics
- Indigenizing the Japanese Language Curriculum
- PSYO 270: Introduction to Research Methods and Design
- داستان آسان ۱ – Orthography of Persian
Indigenous Knowledges and Open Education Edited Volume
Many conversations around open education (OE) focus on a Eurocentric framework of copyright and intellectual property rights that are sometimes in tension with Indigenous knowledge systems, and the goal of this volume is to centre Indigenous ways of knowing, culture, experiences, and worldviews within the work of open education pedagogy and advocacy work. UBC Okanagan Library is working with the editorial team to publish this volume with Athabasca University Press in 2023. The volume will be licensed a under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
UBC Library worked closely with faculty to incorporate open pedagogical practices into courses, engaging students as active participants in open knowledge creation and circulation. The following highlights open pedagogy projects in 2021/2022.
- UBC Okanagan Library consulted with RESPECT, an online student-led magazine, on open licenses and Creative Commons. RESPECT publishes essays, interviews, artwork, photographs, multimodal, and interactive presentations related to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). All submissions are licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
- UBC Library published the Digital and Multimodal Publishing Guide. This guide offers a few examples of the types of digital and multimodal publishing tools that are freely available through the Internet with some information to get you started.
- UBC Library Vancouver supported HIST 403 – Seminar in the History of International Relations Wikipedia-based assignment. Students were asked to edit and improve Wikipedia articles.
The Open Education Librarians on both the Okanagan and Vancouver campuses participate in a number of provincial and national committees and working groups to improve awareness, engagement, and funding potential for open education.
Brtish Columbia Open Education Librarians (BCOEL) Steering Committee
Chair: Donna Langille, Community Engagement and Open Education Librarian (UBC Okanagan), September 2021-June 2022
Member: Erin Fields, Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian (UBC Vancouver)
Both Open Education Librarians at UBC participate in BCOEL, a supportive community for British Columbian librarians to learn about open education practices. BCOEL is currently working on an open repository using OER Commons to share teaching, learning, and administrative materials related to open education.
CARL Open Education Working Group (OEWG)
Advocacy Working Sub-Group Member: Erin Fields, Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian (UBC Vancouver)
This year the Advocacy Working Group developed a National Framework for Open Educational Resources in Canada with 14 faculty members, librarians, and other education representatives, to advance discussions and facilitate, where possible, coordination on advocacy work at the federal level. The document is currently being used to inform and support the activities of the OER National Strategy – Stratégie nationale en matière de REL group when in discussion with federal bodies.
COPPUL Open Educational Resources Standing Committee
Chair: Erin Fields, Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian (UBC Vancouver)
The Open Educational Resources Standing Committee’s role is to identify and understand the intersections between the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) working groups and committees and open education initiatives and practices. The committee will make recommendations to the Board and Directors on Open Educational Resource initiatives.
SPARC Open Education Leadership Program
Participant: Donna Langille, Community Engagement and Open Education Librarian (UBC Okanagan)
The SPARC Open Education Leadership Program is an intensive professional development program to empower academic professionals with the knowledge, skills, and connections to lead successful open education initiatives that benefit students. A capstone project was completed where a strategy and service model for supporting and sustaining open education across UBC Library was developed. This project focused on how the library at both the Okanagan and Vancouver campuses can work together to leverage resources and expertise and build out new services through collaboration.
As we look to the future of open education in the library, we recognize the importance of campus policies, recommendations, and granting opportunities that will directly impact educational resource selection,use, and creation within the classroom. We will work with faculty to address these directions through engagement with open education and open practices.
OER Campus Grants
Okanagan
After a successful pilot program, the OER Grant pilot program was merged into the ALT-2040 Fund as a distinct stream in the Fall of 2021, demonstrating the campus’ ongoing commitment to this important area of practice. Three projects were award funds in the OER stream, and an additional three projects with a strong open education component were awarded in the other two ALT-2040 streams.
Vancouver
UBC Library is a full partner in the development and adjudication of the OER Fund. This past year the 3 OER Rapid Innovation Grant were awarded and 9 Implementation Grants.
Policies & Recommendations
Digital Assessment Tools Policy
In September 21, the Okanagan Senate Academic Policy passed Senate Policy: O-131.2, Digital Assessment Tools. According to this policy, “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”.
Student Affordability Task Force Recommendations
In March 2022, the Student Affordability Task Force, consisting of Vice-President Students (Vancouver), Associate Vice-President Students (Okanagan), Provost and Vice-President Academic (Vancouver), and Provost and Vice-President Academic pro tem (Okanagan), published their Report and Recommendations. In this report, the use of open educational resources is cited to help minimize the cost of education materials (p.10).
