BCcampus Open Education offers a growing collection of open educational resources (OER) designed for educators. If you have identified an OER that meets our criteria, we’d like to hear about it.
Suggestions are considered according to collection priorities and team capacity. If we decide to add your OER to the collection, we will contact you. Please only resubmit a resource if there have been significant changes since your initial submission.
Criteria
Required Criteria
- Teaching and learning elements: The OER must be designed to support student learning and engagement as the primary resource for a course. This includes things like learning objectives and activities. We do not accept monographs or standalone supplemental materials.
- An open licence: The OER must be released with an open licence (Creative Commons) that allows for editing or be in the public domain. Open resources that do not allow for editing (for example NoDerivatives) are considered on a case-by-case basis.
- Accessible: The OER must meet the BCcampus OER Accessibility Criteria [PDF]. If aspects of your book don’t meet these criteria, you need an accessibility statement. An accessibility statement highlights the accessibility features and shortcomings of the book and helps readers to understand whether they can access it.
- Adopted in Canada: The OER must be adopted by a course at a Canadian post-secondary institution. OER can be submitted after they have been used for the length of a course.
- An editable file: The OER must include at least one editable file to allow for future adaptation (e.g., Pressbooks XML, Word, LaTeX source files).
- PDF and book cover:If the OER is a textbook, it must be available as a PDF and have a book cover so BCcampus can set up a print-on-demand option.
- High quality: For more information on how we define quality, see the Open Textbook Quality Rubric [PDF].
Preferred Criteria
While the following criteria are not required, we prioritize OER that:
- are written by educators working in the post-secondary sector in British Columbia
- have supplemental resources (i.e., an instructor guide, test bank, assignment descriptions, or presentation slides)
- respectfully incorporate Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies (for more information, see the Pulling Together series)
- incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and open pedagogies
- consider equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout the resource
- include interactivity and multimedia
After Suggestion
Once a resource is suggested to the B.C. Open Collection, BCcampus maintains a record of it. Resources are added to the collection based on collection priorities and team capacity. If we decide to add a resource to the collection, the suggester will be contacted directly.