The Collection
Relevant Materials for B.C. Educators
The Open Course Collection is a curated selection of course materials developed by educators in B.C. that can be accessed by educators in B.C. and beyond for use in the classroom, in an institutional learning management system, or in other teaching and learning platforms.
All the materials are openly licensed, which means they are free to use, customize, and share.
In summer 2020 BCcampus began creating a collection of open courses to assist instructors and course developers in creating and updating their courses. The collection currently contains several full courses that are openly licensed and ready for use, with more courses being added in 2022. To find out when new courses are added to the collection in your subject area, subscribe to the BCcampus newsletter.
Quality
The Review Process
We’ve taken our learnings from the open textbook project and applied them to the open courses project to maximize quality.
The following are steps in the quality-assurance process for open courses:
- Proposal approved
Once a course proposal is accepted, the course developer is notified, and an agreement is drafted to outline the deliverables for the course.
- Submission
Once a course is completed and submitted to BCcampus, the quality-assurance process begins.
- Course Quality Review
The course quality review is done by an instructional designer who uses the Course Quality Framework developed for this purpose. This framework represents our best current thinking about essential factors for course quality, including First Peoples Principles of Learning [PDF], Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, accessibility, and representation [PDF]. The instructional designer works with the course developer to make any necessary changes to the course to pass the course quality review.
- Payment Issued
Payment for the course is issued once the course quality review is complete and all necessary changes have been made, as advised by the instructional designer who oversees the course quality review.
- Course Added
A course is added to the Open Resource Collection only once the course quality review process and final quality checks by the BCcampus Production team are complete.
- Share
As courses are added to the collection, BCcampus provides updates in the BCcampus newsletter.
- Peer Content Review
Once a course is published in the Open Course Collection, it is eligible for peer-content reviews by subject-matter experts using the rubric provided. BCcampus offers an honorarium for subject-matter experts from B.C. and Yukon institutions who would like to review the content of courses.
Contact us if you are interested in reviewing an open course.
What’s Coming
Upcoming Materials for 2022
We are working on course packs for these subject areas:
- Lower- and upper-level psychology
- Geology
- Sociology
- Entrepreneurship
- Physics
- Math
- Biology
To contribute to the collection, contact us.
