Identifying Opportunities to Develop Open Sustainability Educational Resources Across Disciplines

Project Title	Identifying Opportunities to Develop Open Sustainability Educational Resources Across Disciplines
Principal Investigator	Oliver Lane
Co-Applicants	Tara Ivanochko, Academic Director, Sustainability Hub and Professor in the Department of Earth, Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences, Faculty of Science.
Unit	UBC Sustainability Hub
Funding Year	2023
Project Summary	Since 2010, the Sustainability Hub has provided support to faculty members (more than 60) across campus to develop sustainability and climate change curricula for their courses. These faculty members have created resources including syllabi, course outlines, case studies, assignments, reading lists, worksheets and more, for new and existing courses. These projects help advance UBC’s commitments to climate action and sustainability, jointly reaching thousands of students every year and empowering them to be agents of change in their communities and future workplaces. Open Educational Resources coming out of these projects can further expand our impact, as these educational materials reach more students, instructors and institutions. Our project consists of doing a landscape scan of these courses and materials to understand: 1. Which ones have already been created as OERs, 2. Which have the potential to become OERs, and 3. What support faculty members need to get this done. Preliminary engagements with faculty members show us that there is an opportunity to address common issues such as a) low awareness of what OERs are and the benefits they provide to faculty and students, and b) limited time and resources to engage and plan for this work. If our proposal is successful, we will hire a student to help do this scan, connect with some of these faculty members and identify what is needed to create OERs for various courses in different disciplines. The identification of these opportunities will be used to seed a larger project, in partnership with the relevant faculty members, to develop their materials into OERs that are used as learning materials in their UBC courses and beyond.
Grant type	OER Rapid Innovation
Funded Amount	$2,000