Archives for May 2020

In the 2020/21 Mandate Letter from Melanie Mark, BC Minister of Advanced Education, Skills, and Training, BCIT is directed to make substantive progress on the following priority:

• Advancing and supporting open learning resources.

BCIT has received funding from BCCampus to continue its open education grant program, to support the adoption, revision, and creation of openly licensed learning resources.

A few advantages of using and developing OER:

• OER is shared in digital format so it is easy to add openly licensed materials to online learning management systems.
• Open licenses give various permissions that usually allow the user to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the materials.
• OER encompasses a wide range of materials including textbooks, presentation slides, handouts, videos, images, and much more.
• Instructors have control over the learning materials they use in their classroom – OER can be customized or created to support class learning outcomes.
• Students can engage in meaningful class work to help create or improve open learning materials.
• Courses with low or no learning materials costs provide a significant advantage to students in lowering financial barriers to post-secondary education.

Grant Categories

Adoption – up to $250 – review and adopt an open textbook or other open learning resource, this can include minor revisions to customize it

Revision – up to $2K – take an existing OER and make substantial revisions to better suit class learning outcomes

Creation – up to $8K – create a learning resource – this can be in any category or format, eg.: textbook, video series, question or test banks

Key Dates for Summer Rolling Call

There will be a rolling call for grant applications for any of the grant categories over the summer.

Deadline 1: June 1, 2020

Deadline 2: June 29, 2020

Deadline 3:  July 27, 2020

Deadline 4:  August 24, 2020

Support

The LTC and the Library can provide some support for grant projects. Request for this support should be part of the grant application.

BCIT Library is running an open education publishing program pilot over the next several months. If you have digital learning materials that are suitable for conversion to PressBooks and that you want to license openly, the library will do that conversion for you.

Additional Information

Open BCIT is sponsored by the AVP, Education Support and Innovation, and is supported by the Open Education Working Group, the Library, and the Learning and Teaching Centre. BCIT Open Education Working Group supports and promotes the development and use of OER and OE teaching practices. The Group is under the umbrella of Education Council’s Educational Technology and Learning Design Committee (ETLDC).

Open education grant funds, for the most part, are distributed as part-time studies contracts so are subjected to tax and benefits deductions.

All learning materials developed in whole or part with the support of an open education grant must be licensed openly and deposited in the BCIT Open Institutional Repository.

Find our more about Open Education at BCIT

Review BCIT’s Open Education Best Practices and Guidelines

Open Education Grant application form