Open Education Alberta workshop empowers instructors to utilize open educational resources
By Andreea Timis, August 24 2024—
Over the last few years, the popularity of open educational resources (OER) has significantly risen in post-secondary institutions. OERs are defined as openly licensed materials designed for learning, teaching or research purposes. They are free to access for anyone and can be reused, modified and redistributed.
As an opportunity for instructors to learn how to develop and use OERs, the Libraries and Cultural Resources (LCR) platform at the University of Calgary is hosting a workshop on Aug. 30. The workshop is led by Open Education librarian Sarah Adams and informs instructors on how to create their own OERs on Open Education Alberta — a collaborative publishing service that uses the Pressbooks platform to create teaching material.
In an interview with the Gauntlet, Adams talked about how the workshop helps instructors navigate through the process of creating OERs, use Pressbooks and identify services and supports for creating OERs.
“[The workshop] provides a little bit of an inside scoop, because when you’re thinking about making a resource [there are] so many platforms out there,” Adams said. “I can also help guide them to other platforms that either we have or that are available externally to [LCR].”
Adams also shared that the institutional representatives for post-secondary schools operate on four main values that drive both their internal practices and the Open Education Alberta program as a whole.
“The first one is openness, because we’re all about sharing [and] repurposing works based on the needs of a course, but also openness about our practices. [The second is] collaboration. We’re all at our [separate] institutions, but we’re all working together, and then we encourage collaboration for OER creation and adaptation as well amongst our creators,” Adams explained.
Overpriced textbooks have long been an accessibility concern for students, and the existence of OERs has proven to be a game-changer. Correspondingly, OERs give instructors the freedom to experiment with creating materials specifically tailored to their course.
“And then we focus on sustainability, both of the program and of the OERs that are created. We want OERs to be a living document because they can be adapted and updated over time. [Finally] we focused also a lot on accessibility for Open Education Alberta,” Adams continued.
Adams emphasized the importance of platforms such as Open Education Alberta and discussed why it’s important that post-secondary students and faculty are aware of them.
“Sometimes, faculty [will] learn about a service or resource later and [say] it would have been so useful to know about this before. So it’s a way to try to kind of stop that,” said Adams. “We think that it’s really important to provide an avenue for subject experts in our province, and specifically at the U of C, to share their knowledge and provide them an opportunity outside of the traditional publishing cycle and process that maybe doesn’t suit the resource they want to create or their values.”
When asked about how Open Education Alberta can make education more accessible to students, Adams explained that in addition to reducing anxiety around material costs and budgeting, Open Education Alberta also aims to balance the needs of both students and instructors.
“The OERs that are developed through [Open Education Alberta] work to meet the curricular needs of a course while also balancing the needs of students around their ability to access course materials and be successful in their course. So it does help to create more equity,” she said.
Adams also highlighted the advantage of having localized OERs to more accurately reflect a course’s curriculum.
“The OERs sometimes are more relevant as well, because if they’re more localized to [Canada, Alberta, or Calgary], it can really help to make course material more relevant for students’ learning because they are adaptable or they can be created from scratch if there isn’t anything existing,” she continued.
The U of C has recently had two courses — five sections in total — adopt OERs, which managed to save students over $100,000 in course materials for a single term.
“The one thing that students often focus on is cost savings. And [OERs] can save students a huge amount of money,” Adams said. “So even just for one term, whether you’re creating an OER or just adapting one that’s already existing, it can really save students that money. And also, it’s free, so [students] don’t [really] have to think about the cost when going into a course.”
Registration for the Open Education Alberta workshop is available on the U of C website for instructors and students interested in OERs.