Dear colleagues,

As you may be aware, BCcampus recently launched a monthly award for Excellence in Open Education. The first award went to Dr. Irwin DeVries (TRU-OL) and the second went to Tara Robertson (Mozilla, formerly CAPER-BC). We wanted to challenge each institution to nominate one or more of their colleagues for this award. Award criteria and the nomination form are available at: https://open.bccampus.ca/call-for-nominations-awards-for-excellence-in-open-education/

https://bccampus.ca/2017/12/05/award-for-excellence-in-open-education-tara-robertson/

The second update I wanted to share is that we recently launched two COEPs (Communities of Open Education Practitioners), for Physics and Psychology. The idea behind creating these groups is to facilitate collaboration and sharing among like-minded disciplinary colleagues across different institutions, both within and beyond BC. This might, for example, involve proposing and peer reviewing revisions to within specific open textbooks, sharing ancillary teaching resources, or even helping identify the need for/collaboratively developing additional open educational resources.

These groups are designed to be informal and, importantly, your level of involvement is entirely up to the individual. So, for example, an instructor may choose to draw on shared resources for their own teaching and assist colleagues by reviewing a newly-discovered open textbook. Or they may choose to propose the development of a question bank to support an open textbook, recruit collaborators, and apply to BCcampus for funding to support their project.

In each case, we have created a Google Group to facilitate communication (this functions like a private listserv) and a private Hypothes.is group to facilitate sharing of annotations within specific open textbooks (click here if you are unfamiliar with social annotations).

Anyone interested in joining a COEP should send an email to opentext@bccampus.ca. They will then be added to the Google Group and receive the link to join the private Hypothes.is group. Please feel free to share this email with interested colleagues.

Thank you very much for your support of open education.

On behalf of the BCcampus Open Education team,
Rajiv Jhangiani