Instructors at UBC and beyond can now search through a new curated database full of openly accessible teaching and learning materials. The UBC OER Collection showcases UBC open educational resources (OER) in a searchable interface to support UBC faculty, as well as the general community in incorporating open educational resources and practices into their curriculum. Developed in partnership with the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), UBC Library and UBC Okanagan Library, the collection is one of the many curated resources currently offered by Open UBC.
Each year, the UBC community produces an abundance of open educational resources (OER), ranging from textbooks to course projects, workshops to tools. Until recently, discovering these materials online was a challenge akin to finding an openly licensed needle in a whole field of copyright haystacks. These open learning materials, created by UBC instructors for the courses they teach or to assist other instructors in their teaching practices, are published in a large variety of online spaces that include UBC web properties, but also sites such as Wikipedia and GitHub, or open publishing platforms like OpenStax and PressBooks. Gathering up all these learning materials into a central, searchable database has been a long-held goal for Open UBC, which formed in 2015 in response to the growing interest in open scholarship and the importance of raising awareness and fostering a better understanding of open practices at UBC.
Please read the full story at the UBC Library website.
Through Strategy 9: Knowledge Exchange, UBC is committed to finding new ways to communicate knowledge so that it is more accessible to a range of communities, from citizens to decision-makers.