Open Education Challenge Series

Challenge #1 – Where do I find an open textbook to use in my teaching?

Open textbooks are textbooks that are free to use, adapt, modify, and repurpose.  Importantly, they are free to students.  In BC alone, open textbooks have saved students over 20 million in textbook costs.  There are several well recognized open textbook collections of great quality. OpenStax Open Education Network Many of …

Challenge #2 – How do I modify a page of an open textbook? 

In Challenge #1, you found an open textbook in the BCcampus Open Textbook collection.  One of the advantages of open textbooks is that they can be modified and adapted under certain licenses.  This means that if you want to only use a few chapters, or want to change an image …

Challenge #3 – What is a Creative Commons license and why is it useful?

If you’ve heard about open textbooks, open education resources (also commonly referred to as OER) you may have also heard about something called a Creative Commons license, or CC licenses. For a many years, copyright or all rights reserved was the default for creators of content.  There wasn’t a good …

Challenge #4 – How do I find a Creative Commons licensed image to use in my course materials or presentations?

As educators we are often in need of photos, diagrams, and images we can use to supplement or enhance our course material.  This usually has us googling for images that may or may not be permissible for our use. Fortunately there are a variety of places where you can find …

Challenge #5 – How do I quickly generate the license and attribution for a work that I’ve created?

In Challenge # 3, you learned about CC licenses and how they communicate to others how work can be used.  What if you’ve created something and want to share it with a CC license? How will you easily add your license and your creator information to that work? An attribution …

Challenge #6 -How can I apply openness to student activities?

Up until now, we’ve mostly been discovering open education resources and tools and thinking about how we can apply them in our teaching.  But one area of open education – sometimes referred to as open pedagogy – takes this a step further and applies concepts of openness to student activities. …

Challenge #7 – How can my class annotate an online article or resource in the open?

Open Education isn’t just about reusing or creating resources for students –  it is also about being able to use open tools and open resources to create interesting student activities.  In other words, one of the advantages of openness is that it creates possibilities for different kinds of student collaboration. …

Challenge #8 – How do I search for open curriculum or courses?

Two of our challenges have introduced you to places where you can search for open textbooks, or searching for openly licensed images.  This involved searching within a collection or using Google Advanced search to across some collections. Searching for OERs is one of the biggest barriers for faculty and can …