Welcome to the new BC gateway to Open Educational Resources.

Here you will find FREE TO USE learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.

http://www.opencourselibrary.org/phase-1-courses.

The Open Course Library, run out of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, announced the release of 41 full online courses as part of Phase 1 of the project. These courses are a collection of expertly developed educational materials for high enrolled college courses. The materials — including textbooks, syllabi, activities, readings, assessments — are freely available online under an open license for use by anyone worldwide. The project is set to expand to 81 courses by 2013.

[N.B. I have compiled a spreadsheet of all 41 courses with direct links to the IMS Common Cartridge Exports at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah68UXI2Wb8-dFZmODc1cV95Vm5IWHNwUU9zY05SdHc These should be directly importable into D2L & Blackboard. Moodle's IMS CC import is not fully functional yet, but when it is, these should be easily importable there too. - SWL]

.

http://www.saylor.org/OTC/

The Saylor Foundation has an interesting proposition for existing textbook authors – if you have a textbook for which you own the intellectual property rights, they are willing to offer you $20,000 to relicense the work under a Creative Commons license and thus create another Open Textbook. There are certain criteria that need to be met, and they are looking for textbooks in specific areas. The submission deadline is November 1, 2011 – so what are you waiting for? – SWL

.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/12/put-a-thousand-books-from-the-british-library-on-your-ipad-for-f/.

The British Library has released 1000 books from its 19th Century collection into a free iPad app that includes novels, historical works, poetry, philosophy and scientific books.

.

http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/events/p2pu-adopting-open-textbooks.

This 6 week course run as part of the P2PU will explore the cultural shift of using open educational resources and how it can benefit both educators and learners.

Tags: p2pu.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Alberta+student+textbook+fees+could+half/4010791/story.html

Story in the Edmonton Journal about how Alberta’s Advanced Education minister hopes to cut student textbook fees in half by setting up a provincewide online book depository next year.

Tags: Alberta, ebooks, textbooks.