As a past user of and contributor to open textbooks in BC, I was pleased to see that BCcampus has created a new home for their growing collection of open textbooks and course material packages (see B.C. Open Collection). You can still explore the linear arrangement until February 2024 but I found the new site visually appealing but woefully lacking in usability or accuracy of numbers of resources. On the other hand, I was relieved to see BCcampus restate a commitment (see Accessibility block at the bottom) to provide access to the public for free, forever! So many open resources have become partially shuttered (requiring teacher status or provincial location) while other larger OER repositories require some form of payment to access the quality resources; I am pleased to see BCcampus continue to support the original concept of ‘open’ sharing.
Highlights and concerns of my brief exploration of the new Open Collection page
Highlight Human Biology (Thompson Rivers University) – the integration of interactive self-study options within textbooks (like Human Biology) and additional course packs that contain lecture slides, a student guide and a sample assignment that you can customize and use for your own teaching is a welcome find for any instructor (and for learners!)
Concern I noticed a discrepancy between the numbers of resources listed in a topic area on the home page and the number indicated when I clicked on the box and opened the page that displayed the resources for a topic. I checked the whole top row of topics and found discrepancies in each. For example: Academic/Career Success – 5; detail page shows 11 results I wasn’t able to detect a consistency so perhaps it is a timing issue? The home page graphic is not connected to the 2nd page details results? So perhaps it is being manually updated – so there’s a time lag A minor issue but whatever the cause it was the first indicator that something wasn’t quite as accurate/effective/useful as I was anticipating.
Highlight I enjoyed the simple h5p activities in the Guide to Numeracy in Nursing materials. Each activity seems straightforward to complete and the time tracking encourages learners to practice to improve fluency in applying numeracy skills.
Concern: I found that some of the numbers displayed on the home screen were slightly inaccurate (no big deal, I thought).
I was curious why there were 498 Business resources (largest number of resources by far!) Most other topics or subjects listed less than 100 resources.
When I took a closer look at the Business resources, I found they consisted of: 40 textbooks, 10 course packs, 448 Other Course Materials I poked around a little more and found that the search and sort functions on the new site leave a lot to be desired. I couldn’t find a way to display all the Other Course Materials for one course; tried counting them but they are all displayed as individual resources. I gave up after counting 55 of a incoherently sorted array of BusCom1 and BusCom2.
I tried doing a search to extract only Business Communication resources and found that I couldn’t narrow it to that – I got 8 textbooks for Communication, including 1 for Business/Technical mathematics!? – Course Packs (10) included Intro to Management, Mathematics of Finance, Financial Accounting?
If I can trust the search results for Business Communication in the Other Course Materials field displayed (449), all of those are for two business communication courses – yikes!
So, kudos for BCcampus for continuing their development of and support of open education and open resources. But I think the people organizing and posting the resources may need some additional funding or assistance to make this a user-friendly site. Thanks for doing it though!