Help

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials released with an open-copyright licence and made available online and in a variety of file types to be freely used by students, teachers, and members of the public.

For information on who to contact at your BC institution about open textbooks and open education, find your institution from the list of open education contacts.

1. Search the collection

Use the search to find matching OER based on subject area, course level, institution course codes (e.g. UBC MATH 101), or keywords.

The collection has highly curated materials, so if you don’t find what you are looking for, you can search other OER repositories, such as OASIS, which will return many unvetted resources that may suit your needs.

2. Evaluate

Decide whether the materials found will suit your needs as they are, or if they could be customized to fit your course. Some features that may help you narrow down your search is seeing if the resource has supplementary teaching materials, is accessible, is for the right level, has been tried and tested by peers in the field.

3. Customize

You may find that you want to customize the materials to meet your needs. Download the editable formats to make changes according to the licence.

4. Distribute to your students

You can simply click the “copy link” button to share the OER or course pack page to let your students decide how they would like to best access the materials.

Alternatively, especially if you have made customizations to the OER, you can download the resource in the different available formats and share using your favourite platforms including a learning management system or file-sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

5. Inform us

Inform BCcampus so we can help others see that colleagues are adopting OERs.

You do not need permission to use openly licensed materials; however, you may be required to provide attribution. Check the Metadata section on each web book’s home page to see the terms of the Creative Commons licence related to that book. Most textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection published by BCcampus also have a suggested attribution statement in the License section.

If you’d like to use images from textbooks in the collection, be sure to check the caption of each image and any attribution statements at the bottom of the page for additional licensing conditions that may apply. Images within a textbook are sometimes covered by a different CC licence than the textbook in which they are used. If no additional licensing conditions are indicated, then the images may be reused as per the terms of the CC BY 4.0 licence that applies to the textbook.

An open licence, or open-copyright licence, grants permission to access, retain, reuse, redistribute, and build upon (remix and revise) a work with few or no restrictions. For more information, see Copyright and Open Licences in the Self-Publishing Guide.

Anyone in the world — instructor, student, or other — is permitted to use all items in our collection.

Because these OER are openly licensed, anyone may make changes to the material as long as the original author is given credit. For example, instructors can make changes to a textbook or video to fit what is needed in the classroom.

Many of the open resources in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection have been reviewed by subject matter experts or are in the process of being reviewed. These reviews happen after publication and selection by BCcampus and are marked with a “reviewed” badge. Many of the resources, such as textbooks, may have also gone through a pre-publication peer-review, but these are not currently tracked in the collection.

If you have a collection of OER for a course that you would like to add to this collection, contact projects@bccampus.ca to submit a proposal.