Open access (OA) and open scholarship encompass a wide variety of supports and initiatives that endeavour to make research, information, and creative works more accessible, more transparent, and more equitable. Benefits can include: 

• lower educational costs 

• increased student participation in learning 

• improved accessibility 

• flexibility 

• ability to reach a larger audience 

Physiotherapy open access volume finds home on eScholarship 

Inviting Movements in Physiotherapy: An Anthology of Critical Scholarship is a research publication of the international Critical Physiotherapy Network (CPN), in collaboration with the College of Rehabilitation Sciences. Produced with the support of the UM Libraries, it is now hosted on eScholarship. 

“The Critical Physiotherapy Network… has deep commitments to sharing ideas and conversations freely. We chose to publish our newest anthology with eScholarship because we are fundamentally committed to open access scholarship,” says Patricia Thille, the lead editor of the anthology and associate professor in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Manitoba.  

The book was assessed through an open-identities peer review process, which the CPN used for its earlier volumes published by Routledge and Cappelen Damm. 

The skill and commitment of the eScholarship team, led by OER Specialist Glenn Bergen, was essential to this new volume’s successful publication, Thille says. “Glenn walked through the steps while also working with us to think through future opportunities for this book.”  

Future opportunities include presentations, podcasts, or workshops that could be added to the eScholarship portal to live alongside the book, “creating a cohesive and robust collection of resources,” says Thille. “Book publishing isn’t where eScholarship’s content needs to end.” 

New open educational resources support engagement with learning 

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching resources available in a variety of formats that have an open copyright license, which allows anyone to use, adapt and share them at no cost.  

Resources include: 

• open textbooks 

• online teaching resources 

• interactive lab manuals 

• an open educational resource to support patient and public partners in health research 

Learn more 

UM Libraries has long been an advocate and supporter of the creation and use of open educational scholarship and resources. The Libraries two-year pilot funding project Advance Open Ed has now become a permanent part of the library’s open publishing support system, after having supported 21 OER projects that will impact approximately 7,300 students each year. 

Learn more about supports for open at the University of Manitoba at Open@UM

Browse publications and open teaching materials on eScholarship 

Submit a project proposal 

About the eScholarship platform 

eScholarship is a new site that aims to provide faculty and students with tools for creating and sharing research digitally. eScholarship is powered by the open-source Manifold publishing platform. 

Hosted by University of Manitoba Libraries, the eScholarship site provides readers access to a variety of different open publications, open educational resources and more. 

The platform makes it easy to incorporate multimedia elements into text-based publications, and provides secure, long-term storage for publications. 

What you can publish 

When UM history professor Adele Perry came across a blog post from two Canadian historians about their textbooks going out of print, she thought they would be a good fit for the eScholarship platform.  

UM Libraries was able to give the textbooks a new life by helping publish them on the eScholarship platform. Origins and Destinies by Canadian historians Robert Wardhaugh [PhD/95] and Alan MacEachern are now available for free online. 

Many different kinds of multimedia projects can be published with the eScholarship platform. Some of the projects published or in the process of being published on eScholarship include:  

• Open educational resources 

• A collection of honours thesis project posters 

• Texts with embedded audio files 

• Open-access editions of already published content 

• Research with interactive GIS maps from UM’s GIS hub  

Submit an open publishing project proposal 

Publish your work and research now on eScholarship.  

Submit a publishing project proposal now 

More support 

Contact OER Specialist, Glenn Bergen with questions. 

Other open publishing platforms the Libraries provides include Open Journal Systems (OJS), a scholarly journal platform, and MSpace, UM’s institutional repository.

Learn more about the Libraries open publishing platforms and services. 

Advance Open Ed, a two-year initiative to build capacity and awareness of OERs at UM, provided funding for the creation of 21 OER projects. As a result of this success and UM’s ongoing commitment to open education, the Libraries is now offering ongoing support and funding for OER.

Applications are being accepted for grants up to $10,000. The deadline to apply is August 15, 2025.

Funding application and guidelines

OER grant budget template

Funding makes management textbook free online

Professor Bruno Dyck in the Department of Business Administration saw the Libraries OER funding as an opportunity to create a new edition of a management textbook first published in print and as an e-book and sold to students around the world.

Dyck only applied for the funding after talking with colleagues at UM and other schools who agreed that OER was a good thing. In previous years he and his colleagues had strongly discouraged him from publishing a no-cost book, telling him that such a book would not be valued. However, as Dyck says, “times have changed.”

Management: Financial, Social, and Ecological Well-Being was written by a team of seven international co-authors, several of whom said they would not have joined as co-authors had the book not been an OER.  A unique feature of the book is that each chapter offers three approaches to management: Financial Bottom Line (FBL), Triple Bottom Line (TBL), and Social and Ecological Thought (SET). Research has shown that this increases students’ critical and ethical thinking, and makes them less materialistic and less individualistic.

Relationship between financial, ecological, and social realms under the three management approaches: Financial Bottom Line (FBL), Triple Bottom Line (TBL), and Social and Ecological Thought (SET).

The textbook is used in introductory management courses at the Asper School of Business and other universities and colleges. It has been endorsed by leading scholars in the field and is designed for use internationally. Currently, the OER is being peer-reviewed and piloted by students in the Philippines and British Columbia.

This OER textbook covers all the core material found in conventional management textbooks, plus it offers some new learning features that are possible with OER, including interactive test-prepper questions throughout the text and integrated whiteboard animation videos in each chapter.

More OER support

Tools, platforms and support provided by UM Libraries include:

• Pressbooks – book/document production and sharing application.
• eScholarship – open digital multimedia publishing platform for the UM community.
• Open Journal Systems – open-access journals.
• MSpace – UM’s institutional repository for preserving and providing open access to the scholarly works of University faculty and students.
• Article processing cost discounts for gold open access journal titles.
• Expert subject librarians who can help you navigate the OER field.

Learn about open educational resources

Contact UM Libraries for more information or with any questions.

Open Horizons: Affordability and Access through Open Education

Manitoba Open Education Symposium

Wednesday, June 11 to Thursday, June 12, 2025

100 Innovation Drive, University of Manitoba

Program details and registration 

Speakers 

Speakers include: 

• Amanda Coolidge, Executive Director of BCcampus 

• Robert Luke, CEO, eCampusOntario 

• Apurva Ashok, Executive Director at the Rebus Foundation 

BCcampus and eCampusOntario are provincial hubs that collaborate with post-secondary institutions to support online learning.  

About open education 

Open education is a movement that promotes free and open access to educational resources, tools, and practices to reduce barriers to learning. Read more about open education at UM. 

The symposium will bring together educators, students and administrators to discuss how to build an open and accessible education system that encourages digital innovation, collaboration across institutions, and is affordable for students. 

Register now 

Space is limited, so register now to be part of this event that will drive the future of open education in the province and beyond. 

The Manitoba Open Education Symposium is organized by Campus Manitoba, Assiniboine College, RRC Polytech, the University of Winnipeg, and the University of Manitoba. 

Students can now read and interact with Pressbooks content and H5P interactive activities without ever needing to leave UM Learn. H5P activities, like quizzes, can also be incorporated into the UM Learn grading system so student results can automatically be added to their grade. 

Create or modify course content with Pressbooks 

UM instructors have access to the Pressbooks Author & Editing platform, with support from UM Libraries. Instructors can create new written or interactive content on Pressbooks or copy (“clone”) existing content to configure it for the UM Learn integration. Cloning existing content is easy, and configuring content for integration is as simple as checking a box. 

Add interactive activities to courses with H5P 

The H5P plugin aims to make it easy to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 content. Instructors can create many different activities with H5P, from multiple-choice quizzes to complex branching scenarios for virtual simulations.  

Find content for your courses 

To find existing Pressbooks with or without H5P, explore the Pressbooks directory or other open educational resource directories for content authored on Pressbooks. 

Support for Pressbooks 

Learn more about Pressbooks or contact your subject librarian with questions. 

Contact the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning for support with developing teaching materials.  

Education: The Future is Open 

Friday, March 7, 2025, 2:30-4:00 p.m. 
Senate Chamber, Room E3-262 EITC 
This session will be in-person with a live-stream option. 
Details and registration 
 
Richard Baraniuk [BSc (Eng)/87] will share his experience with the Open Education movement, a grassroots movement shared by a wide range of academics, recognizing that: 

• knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use 

• collaboration should be easier, not harder 

• people should receive credit and kudos for contributions to education and research 

• concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that traditional media present 

Baraniuk will speak to this pivotal moment for the OpenEd community to come together as education is reshaped by advances in AI, evolving student needs, and expanding global challenges.  

About the presenter 

Dr. Richard G. Baraniuk, a graduate of the University of Manitoba, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University and founder and director of OpenStax (formerly Connexions) as a platform for open knowledge sharing and the world’s largest OER publisher with more than 70 digital textbooks used by 7 million college and high school students this school year. He is also the founder and director of SafeInsights, a large-scale education research hub that will safely connect educational institutions, researchers, and learning platforms. Baraniuk has been active in AI theory research and education applications for 15 years and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, AAAS, and IEEE.  He has received numerous research and education awards, including the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal, the James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, and the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education. 

This event is supported by the Advance Open Ed project. 

At the University of Manitoba, Bisons are at the centre of health care, finance, Reconciliation and so much more. Wherever there’s a challenge, you’ll find UM alumni leading the charge. Explore the Bisons at the Centre campaign and meet the alumni shaping Manitoba and beyond. 

Related activities 

• Check out the previous event in the series: From Access to Justice: Realizing the Transformative Potential of Open Educational Practices, with Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani. 

• Advance Open Ed provides financial and practical support along with educational opportunities to help the UM community create, adapt, and adopt open educational resources (OER).  

In celebration of International Open Access Week, October 21 – 27, 2024, here are two funding recipients whose open educational resources are already being used by students.

Celine Latulipe

Celine Latulipe, professor with the Department of Computer Science, has developed the Java Active Learning Workbook, an open educational resource that includes programming activities designed to be scaffolded. The workbook is used in COMP 1020, a course recently updated from traditional lecture-style to spending more time doing active learning activities. Taught in Java, the course is meant to prepare students to do programming required in later classes.

The workbook was developed using the Trinket open-web-based platform, with explanatory text and embedded instructions included, and allows students to write code online in the pages of the workbook.  

Students follow the instructions and edit the code to test their understanding and ability to apply the concepts.

Open-access workbook helps students learn worldwide

Thus far, student feedback on the open-access workbook has been overwhelmingly positive, with 85% of survey respondents indicating that the trinket activities helped them to test their understanding of the material. In the open-ended feedback, students talked about being surprised by how helpful the trinkets were and how they were better than just listening to lectures, especially in terms of how they helped them do better on tests.

“I wanted the trinkets to be an open resource because there are students all over the world who want to learn programming and having an organized, scaffolded workbook of practice activities can be helpful,” Latulipe says. After a bit more refinement, the team will be submitting the workbook to EngageCSEdu, an online repository of open-access computer science education resources.

Julianne Doner (Photo credit: Joy Wells of Pure Joy Photography, Kingston.)

Julianne Doner, linguistics resources designer, is writing an open, digital textbook for a second-year course in Introductory Morphology and Syntax and is involving students in its creation. The silver lining to working with an open educational resource is that you don’t need to wait for it to be completed before you start using it. Doner has written a chapter mere weeks before students read it, and then goes back to update a chapter right after it is covered in class because students have asked questions.

“The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures” textbook meets several important needs. First, there is no single textbook that combines both the introductory study of morphology (the structure of words) and syntax (the structure of sentences), despite many universities combining the two into one course, including the University of Manitoba. Without Doner’s textbook, students would need to purchase two textbooks for one course.  Second, the textbook has a justice focus, including a section on decolonizing linguistics, and third, provides Canadian content, which is lacking from current morphology or syntax textbooks.

Doner’s digital resource is multimedia, including links to digital resources such as relevant comic strips and other fun materials, and interactive questions so students can get instant feedback on their understanding of the reading. “I can bring it up on my phone,” Doner says, “So I have showed it off at parties and at conferences, where I never expected to be talking about my textbook. People ask about it and I can immediately send them a link. Friends and family have a question about linguistics, and I can send them to the section of the textbook where it is explained and they don’t have to buy an expensive textbook.”

Students appreciate zero textbook cost

Students “definitely appreciate that it’s free,” Doner says about her open digital textbook. “You can see it in their body language when I announce that it will be a Zero Textbook Cost course on the first day of class.” A few students have volunteered to help with the textbook and many students have gone out of their way to complete the surveys about it and submit text errors.

UM Libraries essential resource in OER development

“I don’t think it’s possible to do this on my own, and UM thankfully has lots of support for those developing OERs. The OER working group at the library provides resources, technical support, professional development, and even funds. The Faculty of Arts has also provided a lot of funds through grants such as the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund and other initiatives. I also hope that other linguists with expertise in different languages will see value in my textbook and contribute to it.”

Doner continues, “A lot of linguistics instructors already develop resources and freely share them. I wish they knew how easy it was to slap a Creative Commons license on those materials to make it even easier for others to adapt and share them in a variety of ways!”

In a recent survey of UM faculty and instructors, conducted by Libraries, 36 percent of respondents reported assigning, adapting or creating OER for their classes. Furthermore, respondents said that of the open teaching materials they are using, half are replacing commercially available textbooks.

For more information on open access or open educational resources, see Open@UM.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024, 12 noon to 2:30 p.m.
Room 108, St John’s College, University of Manitoba
Details and registration
Pizza and coffee will be provided for registrants.
To attend in person, click the blue Begin Registration button in this link. Register by Zoom to attend virtually. 

Kayla, joining us via Zoom, will share Reflections of amiskwaciy: Indigenous protocols in open education, followed by an in-person panel of open educational resource (OER) users from the University of Manitoba who will discuss their experiences with OER. 

Kayla Lar-Son is a member of the Metis Nation of Alberta, with Ukrainian heritage, and is originally from Tofield Alberta. She holds a BA in Native Studies from the University of Alberta and an MLIS from the University of Alberta. She is the current Acting Head of the Xwi7xwa at the University of British Columbia. 

The panel of UM OER users:

• Julie Doner, Linguistics
• Xinli Wang, Mathematics
• Charlotte Moore, Education

Facilitator: Dr. Mark Meagher, Architecture 

6 R’s of Indigenous OER

6 R’s of Indigenous OER provides an Indigenous-focused framework for incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into openly-licensed teaching and learning materials. The “R’s” are influenced by the FAIR/CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Sovereignty, OCAP, and were originally adapted from the 4 R’s of First Nations and Higher Education and the UBC Longhouse Teachings. This talk discusses new developments in the 6 R’s based on the presenter’s own

This event is sponsored by the Advance Open Ed project.

Related activities

• Check out the previous event in the series: From Access to Justice: Realizing the Transformative Potential of Open Educational Practices, with Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani.
• Advance Open Ed provides financial and practical support along with educational opportunities to help the UM community create, adapt, and adopt open educational resources (OER). Apply today!