UM instructors care about making education more affordable and relevant to their students, as evidenced by the eleven projects underway that have already received Advance Open Ed funding.

Funding and support

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).

Grants up to $10,000 are available to help faculty, instructors, and librarians create, adapt, and/or adopt an open educational resource.

Financial support is also available for individuals to participate in the Creative Commons certificate program or attend the virtual Open Education Conference taking place October 8-10.

Applications for funding are still being accepted.

Additional supports are also available. Contact Glenn Bergen, OER coordinator, Libraries, for further information.

Apply for funding.

OER in action

Celine Latulipe, professor, Department of Computer Science, is using her funding to develop a Java Active Learning Workbook for use in COMP1020. The new resource is providing activities for students to work on during class and it allows students to write code online in the pages of the online book. Thus far, student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with 85% of survey respondents indicating that the activities helped them to test their understanding of the material.

Julianne Doner, linguistics resources designer, Department of Linguistics, is writing an open textbook for a second-year course in Introductory Morphology and Syntax. While UM combines both subjects into a single course, there is no combined textbook available, which would require students to buy two textbooks for the course.  Regarding the new open educational textbook, Doner says the students “definitely appreciate that it’s free. 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.”

You can help

To help us plan for the future, we would like to know about open educational resources that have been or are being developed at UM. Libraries has recently sent a short survey to all faculty and instructors asking about their experience with OER and how open resources are currently being used at the university. Feedback is being collected until the end of September. Please respond to our survey to contribute to the bigger picture of OER adoption at the University of Manitoba.

Explore Open@UM to learn more about open access and open scholarship at UM.

(Graphic: Cover image from The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures, by Julianne Doner, created by Ysabelle Tankeko.)

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!