A Review of BCcampus Open Education Resources

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Finding the right open educational resource (OER) for your course can sometimes be a challenge. However, if you're looking for Canadian-specific content for your courses at York, you might want to start with BCcampus' Open Education Resources.

Read on to learn more about how this repository from British Columbia got started, its pros and cons, and finally some general search tips.

1) History of BC Campus OpenEd Resources
BCcampus has been around since 2002 and helps facilitate experimentation and collaboration in the online learning and open education movement amongst post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, Canada (Klassen, 2012). This organization is funded by the B.C. government's Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training (BCcampus, n.d.-b); however, it also receives funding from non-profit organizations like the Hewlett Foundation for initiatives like its open textbook library (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, n.d.). 

In late 2012, BCcampus announced that it was creating the B.C. Open Textbook project. The ultimate goal of this project was to create access to more affordable educational resources for post-secondary students in B.C. (BCcampus, n.d.-a) In phase one, 40 open textbooks were created to support the highest-enrolled courses in B.C. post-secondary courses. Phase two was started in 2014, and aims to add 20 additional open textbooks to the repository (BCcampus, n.d.-a).

2) Pros
  • The repository provides access to 224 OER as of November 2017.
  • It includes Canadian-specific open textbooks for subjects and disciplines such as business, social sciences, health studies, French and English studies, arts, and even some of the trades.
  • The repository has a clean design and is easy to use in terms of searching. It also clearly tags specific features of the open textbooks, such as:
    • Accessible: indicates an open textbook meets the standards of BCcampus' accessibility checklist.
    • Adopted: indicates if the open textbook has been adopted for use in a post-secondary course.
    • Ancillary: indicates that the open textbook includes additional learning resources such as quizzes, unit tests, or self-tests. 
    • Faculty reviewed: indicates if an open textbook has been peer-reviewed and also provides access to the reviewer's comments.
Figure 1: Image of BCcampus open textbook with tags highlighted

  • The landing page for each open textbook also provides:
    • A description of the book and/or resources.
    • The author information.
    • Access to the textbook's licensing information.
    • Access to all of the various file formats for the open textbook (i.e. PDF, epub, mobi, html, xml)
    • Access to the peer review comments (if the book has been faculty reviewed)
3) Cons

While the BCcampus open textbook repository is well-laid out, easy to search, and provides access to Canadian OER, it doesn't include OER that will work for all post-secondary courses. Instead, the majority of the content might only be suitable for introductory and sometimes intermediate-level courses. This reflects BCcampus's mission of providing OER for the highest-enrolled post-secondary courses in B.C. 

The number of open textbooks does depend on the subject. For example, there is only 1 textbook listed under hospitality, while there are 14 textbooks listed under English. Additionally, subjects in the humanities are not well-covered by the BCcampus textbook repository at the moment. It doesn't include introductory or intermediate-level content for subjects such as women's studies or political science. However, sections of other books in the repository could potentially be repurposed as reading materials for these types of courses. 

4) General Search Strategies for BCcampus OpenEd Resources
There are two main ways to search the repository:

(I) Keyword searches

On the BCcampus website, you can start searching by using the main search bar on the left-side of the webpage. It's best to keep your keywords simple. Once you search, the website will return a number of OER that match your query.

Image of BCCampus homepage with main search bar highlighted
Figure 2: Image of BCcampus search


(II) Browsing with the left-side menu

You can also use the left-side menu to browse through the various subjects covered. However, subjects such as English and History are listed under disciplines such as Arts. Therefore, it is useful to explore the different subjects nested underneath each heading, while also using the main search to locate additional resources using your keywords.

Image of Left-side menu search
Figure 3: Image of Left-side Menu search


References

 BCcampus. (n.d.-a). The project. Retrieved from https://open.bccampus.ca/the-project/

 BCcampus. (n.d.-b). What we do. Retrieved from https://bccampus.ca/about-us/

 Klassen, T. (2012, December 12). BCcampus at 10: From the edge of the possible to mainstream. BCcampus. Retrieved from https://bccampus.ca/2012/12/12/bccampus-at-10-from-the-edge-of-the-possible-to-mainstream/

 William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). Simon Fraser University BCcampus: For support of the BCcampus open textbook project program. Retrieved from https://www.hewlett.org/grants/simon-fraser-university-bccampus-for-support-of-the-bccampus-open-textbook-project-program/
This blog post, authored by Stephanie Quail,
is  available under a CC BY 4.0 international license



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