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OER stories/BCcampus

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1 What is most important in your story?
2 The challenge or problem
3 Context
4 Action
5 What worked
6 What didn't work and challenges
7 Next steps
8 Contact information
9 Notes
10 Other OER stories

[edit] What is most important in your story?

BCcampus has designed and implemented an Open Educational Resource initiative involving all 25 public post secondary institutions in the province of British Columbia, Canada. The BCcampus initiative is unique in a number of ways.

The BCcampus OER initiative differs from most others in that it is sectoral rather than institutional. In the BCcampus initiative OER are produced by all 25 public post secondary institutions in the province. As a sectoral initiative OER are primarily being developed via multi-institutional partnerships involving faculty from more than one institution.

Another unique aspect of the BCcampus initiative is that it is funded using public tax payer money provided through the Ministry of Advanced Education. Investment is made annually via a competitive Request For Proposal (RFP) process and on June 11, 2007 a fifth round of funding was announced bringing the total investment so far to $6.25 million dollars (CDN).

To make the OER open and shareable BCcampus OER developers are given licensing options of Creative Commons or BC Commons. Over 90% have chosen BC Commons which provides for open sharing at the local provincial level rather than globally as provided through Creative Commons.

To manage both global and local sharing BCcampus has deployed a Shareable Online Learning Resources (SOL*R) repository which provides a means for searching, previewing, and downloading OER.

[edit] The challenge or problem

BCcampus is a web-based gateway designed to provide students and educators with one-stop access to online learning resources and services across all of British Columbia's public post secondary institutions.

One of the goals of BCcampus is to increase the number of post-secondary online courses, programs, resources and services available to students. The BCcampus OER initiative targets development at credit based, fully online learning courses in areas of high student demand and labour market need. It seeks to increase access to BC’s public higher education particularly for remote or rural learners and to reduce the percentage of qualified student turnaways or waitlists. By targeting fully online resources the BCcampus OER initiative seeks to to enable student access and enrollment in courses from multiple institutions. BCcampus OER are expected to use clear and defined articulation and transfer agreements between institutions in the province. By providing OER development funding annually, development can be managed such that it gradually builds out to complete online programs leading to a credential.

The public post secondary system in British Columbia is made up of largely autonomous institutions. Part of the mandate of BCcampus is to support greater efficiency and reduce redundancy by fostering collaborations between institutions. The BCcampus OER initiative fosters and targets support at partnerships between multiple public post secondary institutions. Partner institutions each invest in the development of the OER and each use the developed resource. In addition institutions are encouraged to form business relationships with BC e-learning companies, not-for-profits, and/or professional associations for development of OER. This maximizes the use of the resource and works toward the creation of an OER ecosystem within the province.

The BCcampus OER initiative deliberately seeks to leverage a unique aspect of digital assets - the marginal cost and effort it takes to make copies and distribute them over a network. By making the online learning resources openly shareable BCcampus seeks to leverage an initial investment of public taxpayers dollars many times over by allowing for free reuse and customization.

The BCcampus OER initiative seeks to solve a number of development challenges and increase motivation for participation. Developers of OER in the BCcampus OER initiative are accorded intellectual property (IP) and copyright as per the policy of the institutions involved. In some cases institutional policy has IP resting with faculty in others with the institution. The licenses used for sharing provide for attribution. Developers whose work is used by hundreds or thousands of other people receive recognition that can be used to support performance measures and reputation. By having development of OER done via a collaboration across multiple institutions faculty develop a network of professional peers who all collectively are working on a set of common resources over time.

The BCcampus OER initiative seeks to create a source of digital materials that are available for immediate free use eliminating the weeks and months of time it can take to seek permission to use existing digital materials. Not only can the original developers use the resource but any educator across BC's public post secondary system can use the asset immediately without having to go through a permission seeking process.

The licenses used in the BCcampus OER initiative allow subsequent users to modify and improve the original resource. This creates a means for continuous improvement of the resource over time and allows faculty to adapt resources to fit their understanding of the domain or the unique way they like to teach. The BCcampus OER initiative requires resources that have been modified or improved to be contributed back to the repository to the benefit of all.

[edit] Context

Occupying almost a million square kilometres, British Columbia is larger than California, Oregon and Washington states combined, or the combined area of France and Germany. Dispersed across rural and urban areas British Columbia has 26 public post secondary institutions including universities, university colleges, colleges, and institutes which serve the 4.3 million inhabitants of the province. Combined annual operating expenses for all these institutions is about $1.5 billion (Cdn.) These institutions provide about 180,000 student spaces and award over 48,000 credentials each year. Participation rates of the population aged 18-29 in public post secondary is about 52%. An interesting trend in the province is a growing and diverse private secondary education sector.

A belief in the fundamental importance of education is at the heart of the government’s “Great Goal” to make BC “the best educated, most literate jurisdiction” in North America by 2015.

The Ministry of Advanced Education Service plan reports that demand for post-secondary education will result from continued population growth and increased migration. In particular there is an increasing emphasis on life-long learning and English as a Second Language programs, along with increased need for more choice and flexibility in post-secondary education. BC has a long history of articulation and transfer agreements between institutions managed by the BC Council on Admissions and Transfer. This offers students a high degree of mobility between institutions.

Growth in British Columbia's economy continues and is forecast to remain strong for the medium-term. The educational attainment of the labour force is seen as a signfificant factor in maintaining and advancing economic growth in British Columbia. Employment projections for this decade suggest that 70 percent of new and replacement job openings will require some post-secondary education and training.

To help address labour market pressures, the Ministry of Advanced Education has committed to improving access and expanding the post-secondary education system by adding 25,000 new student spaces by 2010. Approximately 12,000 of those have already been funded and this year 2,500 new spaces for graduate spaces for masters and doctorate students have been added. Many of the new spaces are targeted to strategic skill areas such as health care. In addition to increasing post-secondary capacity targeted to labour market needs, the Ministry maintains an active interest in and provides support for skilled technical and trades training.

This past year saw the first comprehensive look at higher education in British Columbia in 45 years. The resulting report called Campus 2020 presents 52 recommendations for strengthening BC's public post secondary education sector. A number of these call for effective use of educational technology.

The Premier's Technology Council reports that British Columbia is the most connected province in Canada, with more than 6 out of 10 of its citizens having access to the Internet. At the end of 2003, access to affordable, high-speed broadband service was available to 89 per cent of British Columbians. The province has strong Information Technology, Life Sciences, Alternative Energy, New Media and Wireless sectors and is home to the world's leading fuel cell cluster. BC even has an e-learning industry association called eLearningBC.

Use of educational technology has burgeoned over the past few years with more and more post secondary offerings involving a web based component, mixed mode approaches and a growing number of fully online offerings. BCcampus is the Ministry of Advanced Education's web-based gateway for online learning resources and services. Complementing BCcampus is a recent Ministry of Education initiative called the Virtual School which serves the online learning needs of the K-12 system in the province.

[edit] Action

[edit] Strategy

There is a long tradition of open scholarly sharing in higher education where research and knowledge creation are built on top of the work of predecessors who receive attribution through open citation and referencing. In the high-tech world, the open-source software movement has become a viable alternative to traditional software development. At its core, the open-source approach reduces the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many developers,^[1] and increases rates of innovation by providing a common code base on which others are free to build.^[2]

Open initiatives in higher education have crystallized around three major areas of activity:

the creation of open software and development tools
the creation and provision of open course content
the development of standards and licensing tools.^[3]

BCcampus has adopted and adapted “open” concepts and methods as a deliberate strategy for building a sustainable approach to the development and use of online learning resources across British Columbia’s entire public post-secondary sector. This approach builds on the long tradition of higher education research, applying its open ethos to teaching and learning resources.

By incorporating an open strategy into a suite of linked system-wide educator services, BCcampus supports sustainability by:

revealing supply
aggregating demand and requirements across multiple institutions
forming partnerships between institutions to avoid duplication of effort
stimulating innovation through open publishing, sharing and reuse.

BCcampus educator services include an annual Online Program Development Fund (OPDF), a set of licenses for making online learning resources shareable, a Web-based repository where educators can contribute and find accredited online learning resources, communities of practice for peer support and sharing, and professional development.

The BCcampus approach has much in common with other Open Educational Resource initiatives around the world but is unique in its system level government support, leadership and vision via public funding provided through the Ministry of Advanced Education. Its origins and funding sources contrast with those of the OER projects with the best-known names: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Rice which have all received special grant funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Moreover, while the BCcampus approach shares aspects of these other Open Educational Resource initiatives, it is unique in the strategic way it incorporates open approaches into a suite of bundled services at a system-wide rather than institutional level. This approach fits very well with the BC government’s Campus 2020 initiative.^[4]

[edit] Online Program Development Fund (OPDF)

The British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education annually provides the OPDF to BCcampus for the support of inter-institutional collaboration and external partnerships. The fund’s purpose is to develop online learning resources: courses, full programs, learning objects, tools, and technologies.

The OPDF is strategically structured to target development of credit-based online learning resources in areas of high student demand or labour-market need. Projects often involve development of multiple courses that build out or represent complete online degree programs. The aim is to give students access to more programs and resources that help them complete degrees, diplomas, and certificates.

The OPDF has been issued via a Request for Proposals (RFP) for five consecutive years: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Evaluation, selection, and award are done by an independent review committee against the criteria expressed in the RFP guidelines.

OPDF funding awards made 2003–2006 total over $5 million dollars for development of 261 courses, 44 course modules, 150 learning objects, and 18 virtual labs and tools. A further $750K of funding is currently being invested through the 2007 OPDF.

The development process for many of the projects from earlier OPDF rounds has now ended so that the resources are in active use by learners and educators across the province. 2006 OPDF included grants for:

a post-graduate diploma in Geographic Information Systems
a certificate program in Renewable Energy Technology
trades competency-based education for auto collision and repair
online courses students need to complete a fully online Bachelors Degree in Tourism Management
libraries partnering in the development of an online toolkit for information literacy, writing skills and learning skills
creation of an Integrated Laboratory Network (ILN) in the province of BC that will provide online, any-time/any-place, shared access to scientific instrumentation, instructional materials and expertise for science education
development of resources to help make online media accessible to people with disabilities
online learning resources dealing with soil-forming processes for use in soil, agriculture, forestry, and natural resource management courses.
creation of needed online courses in areas of adult basic education, early childhood education, psychology, visual arts & culture, health, and business office administration.^[5]

The digital nature of these resources brings with it some unique value propositions, including their ability to be socially authored, economically distributed, and easily customized.

On June 11, 2007 the BCcampus 2007 OPDF Request For Proposal was sent to BC public post secondary institutions inviting proposals for credit based online courses, co-created content (where faculty and students create content together), and professional development.

A key BCcampus educator service is using contractual agreements and licenses to sort out Intellectual Property (IP) rights and copyright of resources in advance, as part of the development process. Agreements and licenses state:

who owns what
for what uses the property is offered
what conditions of acknowledgment and/or payment apply to each use.

In consultation with the Ministry of Advanced Education, BCcampus developed a unique open strategy that supports local and global sharing.

[edit] Creative Commons and BC Commons Licenses

Using contractual agreements, BCcampus accords the IP of all online resources produced through the Online Program Development Fund to the original developer, not BCcampus. Contractual agreements are between public post-secondary institutions and BCcampus. Diverse IP policies are in place at different public post-secondary institutions in BC. For some institutions, IP rights rest with the faculty; in others, with the institution. OPDF funds are distributed via contracts with public post-secondary institutions. IP of OPDF resources is governed by the policy of the particular institution where development is occurring.

OPDF developers are given two options for licensing the resource they create. They may choose to share and reuse according to the terms of the Creative Commons Share Alike-Attribution Canada license. Optionally they may apply a BC Commons license. Both licenses acknowledge copy rights of the developer while defining a set of terms by which the resource can be shared and used by others.

The Creative Commons license shares the resource globally with others. Resources licensed with Creative Commons allow others to copy, use, distribute and make derivative works. The provision is that they share back with others and give attribution to the original author. The Creative Commons license provides a means by which developers become part of the global open educational resource community.

The BC Commons license is similar to the Creative Commons license but limits sharing to the local context of BC’s public post-secondary system. Resources licensed via BC Commons are available to BC public post-secondary faculty and staff only. This option provides developers with an opportunity to experience sustainable development benefits through sharing on a local level, among peers, before considering the larger global context. Over 90% of OPDF developers have chosen the BC Commons license.

The Creative Commons and BC Commons licenses have three components:

A plain English human-readable deed
A full legal lawyer-readable license
An icon and piece of script code embedded into each resource which expresses the terms of the license in a computer Web friendly way.

OPDF developers use the “Generate a license” online service at [1] to specify their choice of Creative Commons or BC Commons license. Both licenses require attribution: that is, whenever online learning resources are used by others, the original developer is credited. Enhancing developer reputation through attribution is a key aspect of sustainability. Higher education is reputation-based, and acknowledging the work of others helps developers earn the regard of peers in much the same way as do research and publishing. Reputation has become a key factor in many Internet sites such as Slashdot, Amazon, eBay and Google where reputation systems are used to enhance participation, service and sales.^[6]

The Creative Commons and BC Commons licenses both allow for the original resource to be modified by others. This enables other educators to add enhancements to the resource or customize it to fit their understanding of a domain or method of teaching.

If a new user modifies or improves an original resource, he or she must contribute the new and improved version back for the benefit of all. This requirement is similar to practices used in Open Source Software development and supports sustainability by fostering a community-based development environment where online learning resources are adaptable and subject to continuous improvement by a network of professional peers.

[edit] Shareable Online Learning Resources (SOL*R) Repository

In November 2005, BCcampus deployed SOL*R as a service for British Columbia’s post-secondary educators.

SOL*R enables educators to contribute and access online learning resources for use in delivery of courses and programs. SOL*R is a Web-based online service that facilitates the sharing, discovery, reuse and enhancement of post-secondary online learning content.

SOL*R has initially been seeded with content funded through the OPDF. As part of the completion of the development of an OPDF project, developers license and upload the resources they have developed to SOL*R. Resources include courses, modules, full programs, learning objects and technologies. Hundreds of online learning resources are now available for sharing and reuse by BC public post-secondary educators through SOL*R.

While initial content comes from the OPDF, all online learning resources are welcome, and developers are encouraged to contribute non-OPDF resources. All BC public post-secondary educators can access SOL*R through the BCcampus portal by creating an account and requesting membership in the SOL*R group. Documents giving step-by-step help to prospective users are available at the Access SOL*R Web page.

A public interface to SOL*R provides a means of making Creative Commons licensed resources available globally.

SOL*R resources are categorized and searchable in a wide range of ways, including academic discipline, contributing institution, program of study and license type. Within SOL*R, resources can be previewed and then downloaded for use if the viewer so wishes. Learning resources in SOL*R differ from most other OER initiatives in that they are in an interoperable format that optimizes them for use in a variety of online course management systems, including WebCT and Moodle. This contrasts with MIT’s OCW initiative, which primarily provides instructors’ course notes in Adobe Acrobat .pdf format for use in classroom teaching and learning scenarios.

BCcampus is interested and actively pursuing opportunities to integrate and federate the SOL*R repository with other collections of academic learning resources and authoring environments.

Together the OPDF, BC Commons/Creative Commons licenses and SOL*R fit together like puzzle pieces as a suite of services that foster open development, sharing, and reuse of online learning resources.

BCcampus collaborative development model

[edit] Open Online Communities

To support knowledge mobilization, communication, interaction and peer sharing of expertise and practices associated with teaching, learning and research, BCcampus has established a network of online communities. Online communities are different from standard websites in that they provide a means for grassroots communication and collaboration among peers through self-service posting of resources, requests and advice.

This approach applies open principles of distributed innovation and methods for cultivating communities of practice.^[7]

BCcampus online communities provide a forum where members can:

publish events to community calendars
pose questions, issues, and observations for discussion
find partners and peers from other institutions to collaborate with
post news, resources, and best practice contributions
showcase and promote online learning initiatives
upload and share images and stories of people, programs and events
interact with others “live” using text messaging and Web-based meeting rooms that support use of Voice over IP, whiteboard, and multimedia.

The network of BCcampus online communities includes:

a community for faculty and education technology specialists across all public post-secondary institutions in British Columbia
a marketplace and expo community that supports collaboration between and among K-12, post-secondary and corporate online learning practitioners
a research community supporting a Community University Research Alliance mapping the Quality of Life and Culture of Small Cities in Canada.

Local and global educators in the Marketplace and Expo online community are using the community space to collaboratively write a book: Using Emerging Technologies to Teach and Develop Robust Online Learning. Researchers in the Small Cities online community are using their community to publish and distribute research results, profile researchers and their projects, and coordinate research efforts across hundreds of participants.

[edit] Professional Development

The growth in demand and use of online learning touches all aspects of higher education. Faculty and staff throughout the institution—from student services to IT, academic departments, and senior management—all need skills and knowledge to ensure that educational technologies are deployed effectively. BCcampus supports the Educational Technology User Group of British Columbia in offering spring and fall professional development workshops open to everyone.

Proposals for development of expanded professional development opportunities are being invited through the BCcampus 2007 OPDF. Proposals are sought for in-house already developed resources that can be scaled and customized for systemic use, new professional development resources, and communication and community building activities. Specific areas of interest were identified through a Learn Together report, commissioned by BCcampus, which surveyed online learning professional development needs across the BC public post secondary sector.

Based on data in the Learn Together report an immediate need for pro-d resources exists in the following areas:

instructional design for mixed mode courses
implementing active learning strategies
teaching and facilitating online courses
assessing and evaluating student work in the online environment
instructional design for online courses
introductions to new tools as they become available
using social software in teaching
using streaming media in teaching
the future of online learning
strategic planning for mixed mode and online learning
education technology sand box for hands on testing and trial use of technologies
a peer mentoring and exchange program

Professional development resources funded through the OPDF are treated the same as other online resources developed through this funding in that they are licensed (via Creative Commons or BC Commons) and shared with all BC public post secondary institutions via SOL*R.

[edit] Conclusion

The BCcampus OER strategy is multifaceted dealing with legal aspects of OER, business models and sustainability, technology utilization and digital format for OER, reuse strategies in the context of academic culture, and policy considerations. This approach is constantly evolving and being refined based on feedback and recommendations from the public post secondary system of British Columbia. At the 2006 Open Education Conference in Utah BCcampus presented the decision framework for its OER initiative using this diagram:

OER decision framework

The idea behind this diagram is to depict the core areas that make up an OER initiative and the decision points and questions that help shape it. We hope it can serve as a visual aid to help devise strategy and design implementation of OER.

These open strategies and educator services are only a piece of the overall BCcampus mission. BCcampus’s executive director describes the complete BCcampus mission in his white paper Creating a Sustainable Online Consortium.

[edit] What worked

Successs indicators and aspects of the BCcampus OER initiative that are working well include:

1. High demand and participation rates

A large number of proposals for Online Program Development Funding are received each year. Over the four rounds of OPDF offered so far there have been 306 proposals seeking about $20 million in funding. Out of all the proposals received 82 have been funded with over $5 million of OPDF funds invested.

2. Partnerships and collaboration

Rewarding inter-institutional collaborations through OPDF funding has stimulated partnerships between BC public post secondary institutions. Of the 82 funded proposals 61 or about 75% involve inter-institutional partnerships. While all proposals came from public post secondary system institutions a large number also include external partners, helping to extend reach and benefits out to hospitals, non-profits, BC e-learning companies, school districts, industry partners, associations, first nation groups and other key organizations throughout the province.

3. Increase number of post-secondary online courses, programs, resources and services available to students

OPDF funding awards made over the four years 2003–2006 total over $5 million dollars for development of 261 courses, 44 course modules, 150 learning objects, and 18 virtual labs and tools. As development of these resources is completed they are put into use by institutions for delivery to students. With most of these resources being fully online student access and enrollment is possible from multiple institutions.

4. Establish OER initiative across BC’s public post secondary sector

BCcampus OER model accepted across BC’s public post secondary sector. All institutions have submitted OPDF proposals and received funding awards.

IP and copyright are dealt with up front and rest with the OPDF developers.

Creative Commons and BC Commons licenses provide global or local open sharing choice for developers. Vast majority of developers are opting for local sharing model.

OPDF developed resources are uploaded to the Shareable Online Learning Resources (SOL*R) repository. From the repository BC public post secondary educators can search for and find online resources, preview them and download them for use freely. As of early 2007 the repository has 689 resources (some OPDF developed resources are submitted as modules), 869 users, and 2,699 downloads. The repository of open shareable resources eliminates the weeks and months of time it can take to seek permission to use existing digital materials. These numbers are growing as additional OPDF projects complete their development. With a significant number of resources now available we are just starting to see a significant number of downloads and educators review and assess existing resources for applicability in future academic program plans.

[edit] What didn't work and challenges

The BCcampus OER initiative is different from most in that it offers developers a choice of licensing options - BC Commons (provincial post secondary sharing) or Creative Commons (global sharing). We initiatlly anticipated that when offered a choice many developers would choose to be part of a global OER movement. This has not turned out to be the case. When offered a choice over 90% of our developers are going with BC Commons. We believe this is significant and that there are definite benefits to proving out a sharing model locally before going global. However, it means that wide open access to the OER for all is curtailed and the extent of reuse and modification is limited to a smaller local base.

In 2003 when we engaged legal counsel to create the BC Commons license we did so from a historical context of "learning objects" which was a research paradigm at the time. The focus was on faculty and providing them with reusable resources. As a result our BC Commons license was written specifically to allow sharing with educators across the BC public post secondary system. We did not explicitly include students though they obviously are the recipients of OER resources used by faculty in delivery of a course. In the interim years it has been interesting to note that most OER report that the majority of usage is coming from students not educators. In hindsight our OER initiative could have greater impact if the BC Commons license allowed for student access.

Launching an OER initiative in 2003 was not met with open arm enthusiasm by all. Having to deal with Intellectual Property and copyright issues up front caused our developers a lot of angst as these are contentious issues handled in different ways at each public post secondary institution. While a considered and legally counselled approach was built in to our OER initiative IP and copyright are emotional issues that tend to get people riled up requiring rational and continuous explanation to sooth.

The BCcampus OER initiative uses Creative Commons and BC Commons licenses. Both licenses allow modifications and derivative works to be created on the condition that they are shared back to SOL*R (using the same license) for the benefit of all. Original developers who received OPDF funds to create the OER balked at having to in perpetuity contribute back each and every update they may make to their original OER. They argued that this far exceeded the effort and funding they received to create the resource in the first place and represented a lifetime license of their IP. In response to this concern we revised this requirement such that all original developers are requested voluntarily to contribute updates they make to their OER while all others who modify an OER are mandatorily required to submit the new and improved OER to SOL*R.

Some developers had serious reservations about letting others modify the OER they created. They feared that modifications would negatively impact the original integrity of the work and wanted the right to approve all modifications. However, requiring an approval process to modify an OER creates a serious impediment to reuse. Both the Creative Commons and BC Commons licenses require attribution where the original developer is cited as creator. One of the fears developers had was that their name would be associated with a resource that they felt had been inappropriately modified. This fear was mollified by allowing developers to request they not be attributed if the resource is deemed by them to no longer reflect their views.

Another area of some contention has been allowing commercial use or not. This is one of the key distinguishing factors between the various Creative Commons licenses. Many of our public post secondary institutions have continuing education units or other such entities that provide educational programming on a cost recovery or even profit making basis. In order to ensure these entities could use the OER legal counsel advised us to have both the Creative Commons and BC Commons licenses allow commercial use. This may have led some developers to favour the BC Commons over Creative Commons license as many did not want their resources to be used by competitors in the private post secondary sector.

Fear of competition has been a significant challenge in implementing the BCcampus OER initiative. All of the public post secondary institutions in BC are autonomous and compete with each other for students and funding is based on enrollments. Some have feared that an OER resource they create will be used by another institution and result in a loss of students. This is mitigated by in built checks and balances built in to approval processes of councils and senates along with the need to provide faculty expertise to support the delivery of OER. It has been important to emphasize that use of the same OER can be differentiated by the services that accompany its provision to students. However, it remains a challenge to have on the one hand an OER development program that promotes collaboration and open sharing while on the other hand you have an enrollment and delivery system that is based on competition.

The BCcampus OPDF has been issued via Request for Proposals (RFP) to BC public post secondary institutions each year since 2003. The RFP has varied in terms of what kind of proposals are sought. The variety of development targeted has included:

complete online degree programs
fully online credit based courses
learning objects
online communities, and
open source tools and technologies

Inclusion of open source tools and technologies complicated our licensing process. In keeping with our practice of offering choices if a devleoper got OPDF funding to create open source software tools or technologies we asked them to choose between the General Public License or BC Commons. This meant that we had to include in our BC Commons license clauses that are specific to technology and software not just online learning resources.

While the BC Commons license creates OER that are open and shared within the BC public post secondary system it retains business opportunities associated with potentially licensing those same resources out of province, nationally or internationally. A number of requests have come to BCcampus from outside the province seeking to do just that. Regretably these have not come to fruition as most public post secondary institutions are not staffed or positioned to pursue and close these kind of business opportunities.

[edit] Next steps

Moving forward, BCcampus expects to see growing use and synergy between open strategies. In addition to open-source software and open educational resources, there is a movement in higher education pushing for open access: the free online availability of peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles. A convergence between these open approaches will support and sustain higher education’s role in knowledge production and global development of a commonwealth of learning.^[8]

The BCcampus model for OER is replicable and can be used by others. The structuring of an OER initiative with sharing at a local level is a particularly interesting aspect of our initiative. Most other OER initiatives are trying to share at a global level. We are monitoring the emergence of OER around the world with great interest and expect to see a range of sharing models emerge across the spectrum from local to global. Others have expressed interest in using our local sharing model including the BC K-12 system, other provinces, other consortia and other countries. We have begun to actively consult and advise others on our approach and how it can be adapted to other sectors/jurisdictions.

Some OER initiatives are developing anonymous educational resources or separate the original faculty developers from having any interaction with subsequent users and reuse modifications. We are pursuing a different path. Some of our faculty developers have come forward to BCcampus expressing interest in marketing and communicating the availability of their resources out to colleagues. We are actively looking at ways to support them in these efforts and to foster the creation of a network of faculty peers collaborating around content. Our belief is that the original OER creator has a vested interest in it and wants to stay involved with it over time. Many of our developers are keen to work with others in a coordinated way on OER evolution and enhancement.

We offer a migration path for those wanting to go from BC Commons to Creative Commons and anticipate some progression from local to global sharing over time.

The BC Commons license supports sharing among educators in the BC public post secondary sector. We'd love to open that up to include all students and citizens of BC. However, this requires improved identity management and authentication processes to implement.

Our SOL*R repository which houses all of our OER is an area where many of our next steps are concentrating. One of the things we can do is link institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS) directly to SOL*R such that content in SOL*R can be displayed on particular course or curriculum pages in the LMS. This saves faculty/developers from having to download content out of SOL*R and then upload it to the LMS.

Another SOL*R related development is to work with developers around creating clean, interoperable content. In BC there are several Learning Management Systems in use including WebCT, Moodle and Desire2Learn. We want the content in SOL*R to be deployable in any LMS and are working on a set of guidelines to help developers understand standards (we are looking at Common Cartridge), workflow process and LMS functionality that supports this.

The local BC Commons license for sharing OER retains outside of province commercial and business potential for developers. We are very interested in supporting these opportunities. Currently unless you are a BC public post secondary educator you are not allowed to see BC Commons licensed OER in SOL*R. In the near future we intend to modify SOL*R to allow everyone to see the meta data associated with BC Commons OER including the contact information for the developer so that those wishing to ask for rights to use or negotiate a license for use with a developer can easily do so.

Now that the BCcampus OER initiative is well established and funded resources are available through a repository for reuse we are developing analytics to track use. Of particular interest are number of downloads of resources and number of resubmissions with new improvements or additions to the original resource.

The 2007 OPDF for the first time invites proposals for co-created content developed by faculty and students together. We are very interested in seeing how this kind of OER compares to that developed by faculty exclusively.

As an early pioneer of open strategies and open educational resources, BCcampus is seeking to establish partnerships and collaborations with others engaged in similar work. With an open strategy, innovation and efficiency are best achieved collectively. By working with others BCcampus hopes to refine and further develop this open “Do-It-Together”^[9] open approach for OER.

[edit] Contact information

For more information on the BCcampus OER initiative contact:

Paul Stacey
Director of Development
BCcampus
555 Seymour Street, Suite 200
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada, V6B 3H6

e-mail: pstacey@bccampus.ca
phone: 604-412-7736

[edit] Notes

↑ Wershler-Henry, D. (2002), Free as in Speech and Beer – open source, peer-to-peer and the economics of the online revolution, Toronto: Prentice Hall, p. 39.
↑ Lessig, L. (2001), The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, New York: Random House, p. 57.
↑ Albright, Paul (2006), Open Educational Resources, Open Content for Higher Education, accessed online (July 2007) at http://www.unesco.org/iiep/eng/focus/opensrc/PDF/OERForumFinalReport.pdf.
↑ Campus 2020 accessed online (July 2007) at http://www.campus2020.bc.ca/.
↑ OPDF Projects Funded complete listing available at http://www.bccampus.ca/EducatorServices/CourseDevelopment/OPDF/FundedOPDF.htm.
↑ Masum, H. & Zhang, Z (2004), "Manifesto for the Reputation Society." First Monday, volume 9, number 7, at: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html.
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↑ Willinsky, J. (2005), "The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open Source, Open Access, and Open Science", First Monday, volume 10, number 8 at: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/willinsky/index.html.
↑ IIEP, (2006), "UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) Forum on Open Educational Resources/Open Content – Do It Yourself Portal discussion forum May through June 2006" at http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forums.php , accessed August 30, 2006. Online discussion forum url is: https://communities.unesco.org/wws/info/iiep-oer-opencontent.