Make education more affordable and accessible with open educational resources
Advance Open Ed provides $10,000 grants to create, adapt, adopt OER
Open educational resources (OER) are gaining momentum at UM, with project funding available once again through UM Libraries.
UM instructors care about making education more affordable and relevant to their students, as evidenced by the eleven projects underway that have already received Advance Open Ed funding.
Funding and support
Advance Open Ed provides financial and practical support along with educational opportunities to help the UM community create, adapt, and adopt open educational resources (OER).
Grants up to $10,000 are available to help faculty, instructors, and librarians create, adapt, and/or adopt an open educational resource.
Financial support is also available for individuals to participate in the Creative Commons certificate program or attend the virtual Open Education Conference taking place October 8-10.
Applications for funding are still being accepted.
Additional supports are also available. Contact Glenn Bergen, OER coordinator, Libraries, for further information.
OER in action
Celine Latulipe, professor, Department of Computer Science, is using her funding to develop a Java Active Learning Workbook for use in COMP1020. The new resource is providing activities for students to work on during class and it allows students to write code online in the pages of the online book. Thus far, student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with 85% of survey respondents indicating that the activities helped them to test their understanding of the material.
Julianne Doner, linguistics resources designer, Department of Linguistics, is writing an open textbook for a second-year course in Introductory Morphology and Syntax. While UM combines both subjects into a single course, there is no combined textbook available, which would require students to buy two textbooks for the course. Regarding the new open educational textbook, Doner says the students “definitely appreciate that it’s free. You can see it in their body language when I announce that it will be a Zero Textbook Cost course on the first day of class.”
You can help
To help us plan for the future, we would like to know about open educational resources that have been or are being developed at UM. Libraries has recently sent a short survey to all faculty and instructors asking about their experience with OER and how open resources are currently being used at the university. Feedback is being collected until the end of September. Please respond to our survey to contribute to the bigger picture of OER adoption at the University of Manitoba.
Explore Open@UM to learn more about open access and open scholarship at UM.
(Graphic: Cover image from The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures, by Julianne Doner, created by Ysabelle Tankeko.)