Open UBC Snapshot 2020: Significant Commitments to Open Resources

In the fall of 2019, the Office of the Provost and the Vice-President Academic at UBC Vancouver committed one million dollars in grant funding over four years to support the adoption, use, and sustainment of open educational resources (OER) at UBC. This grant funding initiative builds upon significant contributions and commitments that UBC faculty, students and staff have already made to using OER at UBC. Since 2011, at least 251 UBC courses or course sections have been identified as having used open textbooks, OERs, or freely accessible resources instead of paid textbooks. In the 2019/20 academic year (September 2019 to April 2020), an estimated 18,440 students enrolled in courses using open resources in place of paid textbooks or readings. This replacement of traditional textbooks with open resources has potentially saved UBC students an estimated $1.8 to $2.5 million this academic year. In acknowledgement of these efforts, the UBC Vancouver Alma Mater Society (AMS), the Provost and Vice-President Academic, and the UBC Library recognized over 55 UBCV faculty and staff as “OER Champions” who have made a significant contribution to the use of open educational resources at UBCV.

Defining Open at UBC

Open education encompasses a set of practices directed at making the process and products of education more transparent, understandable and available to all people. Open educational resources (OER) are “teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this reuse permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, a Creative Commons license) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere” (SPARC, n.d).

UBC faculty, students and staff have a history of engaging with a broad range of open educational activities including:

• The curation and adaptation of freely available materials which may include OER in a variety of formats such as text, videos, interactive media, and more. The openly licensed materials may also be modified or remixed to contextualize them for specific courses or students.
• The creation of open resources, including open textbooks, that are used by multiple UBC courses as well as by other institutions across the world.  
• The adoption of open pedagogies and practices that leverage UBC’s open technologies, such as the UBC Wiki or UBC Blogs, to allow for flexible, authentic, and accessible learning. These practices often emphasize students as collaborators in the production of knowledge.
• The use of open homework systems, such as WeBWork, to create and share problem sets and facilitate access to assessment materials free of cost barriers.
• The development and delivery of open enrolment courses that anyone in the world can take. For example, instructors in the Department of Computer Science have developed a series of online courses for an edX Software Development MicroMasters program. They also use the materials developed for the edX course as open resources in their UBC credit courses.

The snapshot attempts to estimate the impact of open resources at UBC and it focuses explicitly on courses that have used openly or freely accessible resources in place of paid textbooks. In addition to formal OER, this snapshot also includes the use of resources that are free of cost and access barriers but do not include a permissive copyright license At UBC, such resources often take the form of instructor created custom course notes, interactive media, textbooks, and other learning resources that the instructor has created and posted publicly online but which do not include a stated permission for reuse and/or an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. Please see Appendix A for a sample of open resources used by courses at UBC.

Please see the 2019 Open UBC Snapshot for a discussion on research findings that show how OER can improve learning and the student experience.

Estimated Use and Impacts of Open Resources

At UBC, a significant number of students are impacted by the use of open or freely available resources. In the 2019/20 academic year, an estimated 18,440 students took part in  52 courses, or course sections, that were using open or freely available resources in place of paid textbooks. This replacement of traditional textbooks with open resources has potentially saved UBC students an estimated at $1.8 to $2.5 million this academic year. This range reflects alternative buying options available for students, including new, used and rental textbooks. 

 

Since 2011, at least 251 UBC courses or course sections have used open textbooks, OERs, or freely accessible resources instead of paid textbooks or resources. Across those nine years, an estimated 82,000 UBC students were enrolled in those courses using open resources.

The estimated cost savings for students is significant. The replacement of traditional textbooks with open resources has potentially saved UBC students between $8.2 to $11.7 million since the 2011 academic year. 

The calculation of savings is based on the approach used by the BC Open Textbook and the OpenStax initiative project to estimate savings (Lalonde, 2015). It does not include courses that are using OER to supplement paid resources. The high end of the range is based on new textbook prices and course enrolments, while the low-end value is based on an average cost of $100 per student per textbook. For courses in which the replaced textbook cost less than $100, the lower amount was used for both the high and low range.  Additionally, in courses where the original textbook cost is unknown, or if the instructor intentionally chose to use open textbooks when the course was created, a $100 per student cost savings has been used to calculate potential financial impacts. 

High enrolment courses in the Faculty of Science, where instructors are using open resources, represent a significant source of student savings. Instructors’ efforts in the Department of Mathematics to create, improve and implement open resources continue to have a high impact. Approximately 6,500 UBC students used the CLP Calculus textbooks by UBC Mathematics faculty Joel Feldman, Andrew Rechnitzer and Elyse Yeager in in the 2019/20 academic year alone. Likewise, the Department of Computer Science’s investment in developing a wide range of resources that are used in both their edX Software Development MicroMasters program as well as their credit courses is a significant source of cost savings for over 3,100 computer science students at UBC this year.  

Learning Materials Affordability

While the use of open or freely available educational resources continues to have widespread utilization and increasing support at UBC, the affordability of course materials still represents a barrier to learning for UBC students. According to the 2019 AMS Academic Experience Survey (AES), UBCV undergraduates reported that they spent an average of $829 on textbooks or course resources in 2019, which represented an increase from $750 in 2018. Thirty per cent of these undergraduate students reported spending $600 or more, while 17 per cent reported spending $1,000 or more (p. 21). Additionally, 40 per cent of undergraduate respondents reported that they are not sure they can pay for their course materials (p. 13).

Additional AES survey data indicates that over 71 per cent of UBCV undergraduate students have gone without textbooks or resources due to cost at least once, with 35 per cent of students reporting they frequently or often go without textbooks due to costs.

Additionally, over 90 per cent of UBCV undergraduates reported having bought textbooks or resources and having never used them, with 52 per cent reporting that they frequently or often buy textbooks or resources and never use them (p. 71).  Additionally, over 16 per cent of both graduate and undergraduate students reported experiencing food insecurity (unsure of the ability to obtain food or feed oneself) on a monthly basis (p. 68). 

The use of open resources is becoming more of a mainstream practice by students. According to the AES, a majority of undergraduate respondents (88 per cent) reported using OERs in lieu of a textbook at some point in their studies, which represents a slight increase from 86 per cent in 2018 (p. 23).  

Growing Institutional Support: The OER Fund

UBC’s strategic plan, Shaping UBC’s Next Century, published in 2018, articulates the intention to expand the creation and dissemination of open educational resources at UBC. It states that “UBC is committed to making education more affordable and accessible, with expanded creation and dissemination of open educational resources” (p. 21). It also states that “to help address affordability pressures, we will expand financial assistance programs for students including funding and support for continued growth in open educational resources” (p. 41). 

In alignment with the strategic plan, in the fall of 2019, the Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic at UBC Vancouver committed $250,000 in annual funding for four years to:

• Increase the creation, adaptation, adoption, and integration of high-quality OER, including assessment materials, in UBC credit courses.
• Reduce student costs for learning materials and assessments.
• Enable instructors to modify, edit, or adapt high-quality OER to fit their unique specifications and goals to help provide meaningful, contextualized learning materials for UBC students.
• Engage with the UBC community to increase awareness of OER.
• Grow capacity at UBC to support and sustain OER activities.

The UBC Vancouver OER Fund was developed in consultation with student and faculty leadership at the UBCV campus and established through the Academic Excellence Fund. It consists of two grant pathways:

• OER Rapid Innovation Grants: Small grants of up to $1,000, which are available to the UBCV community for innovative activities that increase OER development, awareness, and capacity building.
• OER Implementation Grants: Large grants of up to $25,000 for UBCV faculty who wish to incorporate OER as required materials into their UBCV credit courses.

As of February 2020, the OER Fund has committed over $220,000 for projects in six different Faculties. The projects will support developing open textbooks, creating open problem sets, supporting students in the co-creation of open resources, and more. When fully developed and implemented, the resources created by these projects should impact at least an estimated 5,500 students per year and result in significant cost savings when used in place of paid learning materials. It is estimated that over 60 per cent of the total funding will go to hiring students to support and co-create these projects. See the list of OER funded projects.

TLEF Projects
The UBC Vancouver Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) was created in 1991 to enrich student learning by supporting innovative and effective educational enhancements and has had a priority focus for the development or integration of open educational resources (OER) since its 2017/18 funding cycle. Eligibility requirements were also added toencourage funded projects to openly license their developed materials under an appropriate Creative Commons license to allow for broad sharing within and beyond UBC. Approximately 25 per cent of the 2017/18 TLEF funded projects had an explicit open strategy. In the 2018/19 cycle, more than 39 per cent of the TLEF funded projects incorporated strategies around open resources or practices. In the 2019/20 funding cycle, approximately 59 per cent of funded projects, or 34 projects, identified an explicit open strategy.

Please see the 2018 Open as a TLEF Priority Snapshot for more information and visit the TLEF website for a list of all funded TLEF projects to date.

Beyond the Textbook: Open Assessment Activities

In the 2019/20 academic year, an estimated 75 UBC courses used WeBWork, an open source assignment and quiz application for mathematics and the sciences that has an openly licensed problem library with over 30,000 reviewed questions. The use of open homework systems and problems allows UBC students to be assessed, and to self assess, without cost barriers.

However, according to the 2018 Teaching Practices Survey, 20 per cent of instructors of courses with enrolments over 200 students, 21 per cent of instructors of first-year courses, and 12 per cent of all responding instructors expect their students to purchase access to digital learning resources other than a textbook. In the 2018/19 academic year, it is estimated that at least 10,000 UBC students paid between $840,000 to $1.25 million in aggregate for access to platforms such as Macmillan Launchpad, that were required for assessment activities in their courses.

In May 2019, the UBCV Senate endorsed principles to address fees for access to learning materials as a condition of assessment in UBC courses. These principles address costs, student agency, and call for an investment in financial support as well as OER:

Institutional Support for Open Resources and Platforms
UBC should continue to support the development and use of a wide range of open educational resources, digital materials, and learning technologies that can be used free of additional fees for students. Academic freedom is a core tenet of UBC’s teaching and learning environment and UBC should continue to support, develop, and invest in digital learning materials and platforms that can support pedagogical best practices, enhancement of teaching and learning, and instructor freedom in how they teach without adding to the financial burdens of UBC students. In addition to licensing learning technologies such as Canvas, UBC should continue to invest in the development of open educational resources such as open textbooks, open tools, and open quiz and problem banks. 

To help support the creation and use of open assessment materials, one of the priorities of the UBCV OER Fund is for the development and implementation of open test/quiz/problem banks and other interactive content that can be used for assessment.

The UBC Engineering WeBWorK Project
Agnes d’Entremont, Jonathan Verrett, and Negar Harandi in the Faculty of Applied Science have been developing and deploying online homework questions in engineering subjects using the WeBWorK open online homework system. When they deployed their first question sets in the fall of 2018, UBC had 12 engineering programs with second-year courses (some of which were in the same department, e.g., electrical engineering and computer engineering). Their project impacted students in all these programs, representing around 900 engineering students. Additionally, WeBWorK has easy mechanisms for sharing problems, both through it’s open problem library or github, and the UBC project has created or is in the process of testing over 1,300 problems in 12 engineering subjects (Read More)

Recognizing Champions and Growing Capacity

In the fall of 2019, the UBC AMS, alongside other university sponsors, put out a call for nominations from students and other members of the UBC community to honour faculty, staff, and administrators who work to support open education at UBC. The call stated that while “open is the goal of OER, this does not mean the same thing as free; instructor time and efforts are significant costs that go into the development and adoption of OER. The UBC community members the AMS wishes to honour at this event are true champions of equitable accessibility. They know that all students at UBC should be able to utilize course materials regardless of their socio-economic standing. Each (often unpaid) hour they dedicate towards OER leads to fewer students facing the significant financial burden that accompanies accessing course materials” (Tadepalli, 2019). At the “OER Champions” event in October 2019, 55 faculty and staff members were nominated and recognized for their contributions to open at UBC. 

In 2019/20, UBC also held several events and sessions for faculty, students and staff to promote and increase capacity for open educational practices. These sessions included a full-day series of workshops to support open scholarship and practices, faculty panels on the use of OER, and student facing open learning analytics hackathons. From January 2019 to January 2020, 365 students, faculty and staff (322 unique people) attended events focused on different aspects of open education held by the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT). The Open UBC website, a curated collection of resources for UBC faculty and students to learn about open education practices was expanded in 2019 to include information on open research and open access and had more than 37,000 unique page views in 2019.

Looking Ahead

With the launch of the OER Fund, as well as the continued support of the TLEF, UBC is making significant commitments to increase the scope and development of open resources at UBC and to build additional capacity across the university to support and encourage open educational practices. These direct institutional supports, along with the policies outlined in the 2019 Snapshot, provide faculty who are interested in using OER with time and help  — two resources that are often lacking — and are laying the groundwork for a sustainable approach to using OER. In the coming academic year, the use of open resources will continue to become more common across the university. As the focus continues to grow on the affordability not just of learning materials but also of platforms and resources used for formal assessment, open homework systems, shareable problem banks, and open pedagogies where students co-create knowledge alongside faculty will increasingly play an important role in open education at UBC.   

About the Open UBC Snapshots
Open UBC Snapshots attempt to quantify and explore emerging trends in open educational practices at UBC. The CTLT compiles the statistics and information with support and input from the broader UBC community. Numbers used in this report represent a snapshot of verified activities at UBC; however, a large portion of open educational practices happen independently and may not be accounted for in this snapshot. Please help us make this series more complete. If you are using open resources in your teaching and learning or are aware of any open practices or adoptions on campus, please let us know!

References

Burnham, J., Stolba, V., Goddard J., Tadepalli, N. &  Rosales, G. (2019). 2019 Academic Experience Survey Report. The Alma Mater Society of UBC. Retrieved from https://www.ams.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/099-20-2019-AMS-AES-Report-Submission-report.pdf.

Hendricks, C. (2019). UBC Vancouver Senate Endorses Principles for Digital Learning Materials Used for Assessment. Open UBC. Retrieved from: https://open.ubc.ca/ubc-senate-endorses-principles-for-digital-learning-materials-used-for-assessment/

Lalonde, C. (2015). Calculating Student Savings. BCcampus. Retrieved from https://open.bccampus.ca/2015/02/18/calculating-student-savings/

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (n.d). Open Education. SPARC. Retrieved from: https://sparcopen.org/open-education/

Tadepalli, N. (2019). AMS Calls for Nominations for OER Champions. Open UBC. Retrieved from https://open.ubc.ca/ams-calls-for-nominations-for-oer-champions/

The University of British Columbia. (2018). Shaping UBC’s next century: Strategic Plan 2018–2028. The University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://strategicplan.ubc.ca/

Appendix A: Sample of Open and Freely Available Resources Used at UBC

Please help us make this list more complete: if you are using an open resource at UBC that is not listed below, please let us know!!

Year	Term	Course	Impacted Enrolments	Link to Open Resource
2019/20	Winter Term 2	CHEM211	125	Analytical Chemistry
2019/20	Winter Term 2	CPSC107	161	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Winter Term 2	CPSC110	691	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Winter Term 2	CPSC210	448	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Winter Term 2	CPSC310	285	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Winter Term 2	CPSC322	173	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents and AIspace: Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence
2019/20	Winter Term 2	MATH101	1545	CLP Calculus and other freely available resources
2019/20	Winter Term 2	MATH200	908	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 2	MATH220	218	Book of Proof
2019/20	Winter Term 2	MATH317	188	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 2	PHIL220	122	forall x (UBC Edition)
2019/20	Winter Term 2	PHIL320	36	Sets, Logic, Computation
2019/20	Winter Term 2	PHYS118	118	OpenStax: University Physics Vol 2 and part of Volume 3
2019/20	Winter Term 2	PSYC308a	274	Principles of Social Psychology
2019/20	Winter Term 1	ATSC201	89	Practical Meteorology
2019/20	Winter Term 1	CHEM211	163	Analytical Chemistry
2019/20	Winter Term 1	CPSC110	795	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Winter Term 1	CPSC210	448	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Winter Term 1	CPSC322	186	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents and AIspace: Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence
2019/20	Winter Term 1	CPSC340	177	Mix of freely available textbooks including Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, and The Elements of Statistical Learning
2019/20	Winter Term 1	CPSC422	97	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents
2019/20	Winter Term 1	EOSC110	127	Physical Geology
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH100	1,608	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH102	1,833	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH104	1,027	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH110	211	Active Prelude to Calculus and Active Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH180	471	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH190	65	Mix of freely available textbooks including CLP Calculus, Contemporary Calculus, and Single Variable Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH200	908	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH210	117	Mathematical Python
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH215	189	Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH218	84	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH220	402	Book of Proof
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH253	609	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH255	199	Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers
2019/20	Winter Term 1	MATH317	123	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Winter Term 1	PHIL220	335	forall x (UBC Edition)
2019/20	Winter Term 1	PHIL332	15	Boxes and Diamonds: An Open Introduction to Modal Logic
2019/20	Winter Term 1	PHYS100	676	OpenStax: College Physics
2019/20	Winter Term 1	PHYS117	302	OpenStax: University Physics Vol 1.
2019/20	Winter Term 1	PSYC101	239	OpenStax: Psychology
2019/20	Winter Term 1	PSYC102	927	Noba and OpenStax: Psychology
2019/20	Full Term 1-2	SCIE001 (Biology Section)	77	Mix of freely available resources including Nature Scitable Resources, NLM Genetics Home Reference, Understanding Evolution, Learn Genetics and UBC Instructor Recorded Lectures
2019/20	Summer Term 2	CPSC210	172	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Summer Term 1	CPSC110	138	UBC edX Software Development Program Materials
2019/20	Summer Term 1	CPSC322	151	Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals of Computational Agents and AIspace: Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence
2019/20	Summer Term 1	MATH100	82	CLP Calculus
2019/20	Summer Term 1	MATH220	40	Book of Proof
2019/20	Summer Term 1	PHYS100	83	OpenStax: College Physics
2019/20	Summer Term 1	PSYC101	171	OpenStax: Psychology
2019/20	Summer Term 1	PSYC102	150	OpenStax: Psychology