News Archives: Open Educational Resources At GPRC
Thursday, August 17th, 2017
GPRC has been successfully implementing cheaper course resource options and the promotion of Open Educational Resources (OER) since the Students’ Association (SA) began advocating for them last year.
“GPRC is very supportive and very student-focused. The SA and the College have a great working relationship. In fact, it’s unseen in most other institutions,” said SA President Blaine Badiuk.
GPRC History Instructor Daryl White has been listening to student feedback and moving away from textbooks and to OERs over the past few years. “It wasn’t that I started the semester and said I want to develop OERs for students. It was really rooted in student feedback,” said White. “When you start to reflect on how you are teaching and ask, ‘Why am I doing it this way?’ it leads you to places that are very different.”
When students told White they were not using the textbook, he listened to their feedback and replaced the textbook with online resources, OERs, and videos he recorded. For students who enjoyed learning from a textbook he offered recommendations.
“Even as we move to OERs, there are always textbook options for students.” said Badiuk. “What we’re trying to champion isn’t a full switch to OERs, but we do believe that for many situations an OER would fit better.”
To help instructors create OERs, the Educational Technologies Centre (Ed. Tech.) customized their Open Educational Resource Awareness Course for faculty. Instructors were invited to take the course and then work with Ed. Tech. to replace resources that involved a student fee with a free resource or an in-house creation.
“Give us an idea of what you want, we’ll create it with you or find existing resources, and stick it in Moodle,” said GPRC Instructional Designer and supervisor of Ed. Tech., Anna Gillis.
“Ed. Tech’s experience and familiarity with the required technology and copyright is an invaluable resource,” added White. “They look after so much of the technical side for you and that lets you just think about the content.”
While instructors have complete control over the OERs they design themselves, there is also a large library of templates and ready-made, peer reviewed content. OERs also have a creative commons license, which allows instructors to edit, add, or delete content to better fit their course.
As for the benefit to students, cost puts OERs at a clear advantage. “With the financial burden [of post-secondary education] being so high, students sometimes do not buy textbooks. We believe students should never have to choose,” said Badiuk.
Other benefits include the opportunity to make learning more flexible by expressing things in different ways, appealing to different learning strengths and styles, creating unique review activities, recording lectures to free up class time for interaction, and removing the weight burden of carrying textbooks.
“The administration has also stressed the value of this technology because they see it as an opportunity to decrease the barriers of distance,” added White. “It provides more opportunity for the students at our video conference sites to have the same experience as students at the main campus.”
This year, Ed. Tech. has worked with GPRC Business Instructor Cibylla Rakestraw, who replaced all publisher online resources with in-house creations for a second-year business admin course; GPRC Science Instructor Beatrice Amar, who made one second-year biology course textbook-free; Nursing Instructor Sue Styles, who created a virtual field trip and a completely free, open textbook for the perioperative nursing program; and Chemistry Instructor Les Rawyluk, who is now using a free textbook available via BCcampus OpenED for two introductory chemistry courses.