Capilano University receives Open Education Sustainability Grant
Capilano University is pleased to announce it has received a 2019 Open Education Sustainability Grant from BCcampus. This funding helps our faculty promote and use open education materials – teaching and learning resources and practices – that are freely shared to increase access and affordability to education.
CapU is one of only four institutions to receive the grant this year. The University will use the grant to create four new open education resource (OER) Fellow positions in 2020. These individuals will promote awareness and increase use of open textbooks and OER on campus.
“We are thrilled about this opportunity to increase open education practices at Capilano University,” says Laura MacKay, director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence at Capilano University, who worked with CapU education developer Barry Magrill to develop this successful grant application. “This grant will help improve affordability and accessibility for CapU students through reduced textbook costs, and will support the development of new open teaching practices.”
Other CapU OER initiatives will include:
- Developing a faculty and student four-day open pedagogy sprint to create a bank of material focused on experiential education learning.
- Creating an Open Education Showcase to raise awareness and interest in open education work.
- Providing ongoing support for Open Education through a series of workshops on Pressbooks and Creative Commons licensing.
- Archiving open textbooks in our own repository of educational materials.
BCcampus supports the Province’s vision of promoting open and affordable education. It works closely with B.C.’s post-secondary institutions to build the B.C. Open Textbook Collection, and allow post-secondary institutions to take the next step toward campus-based open education sustainability by integrating open education teaching and learning into their current systems.
Submitted by: Linda Munro