Textbook Affordability and Open Educational Resources (OER)

The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students. This is a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC.

This worksheet walks you through a few ways you can make the OER in your course more inclusive for your students.

This resource is a modification of the Washington Models for the Evaluation of Bias Content in Instructional Materials (2009) that is made available through OER Commons under a public domain license. This resource attempts to both update the content with more contemporary vocabulary and also to narrow the scope to evaluating still images as they are found online. It was developed as a secondary project while working on a BranchED OER grant during summer 2020. It includes an attached rubric adapted from the Washington Model (2009).

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
-Provide three examples of ways an OER can be checked for accessibility.
-Explain how Universal Design for Learning is a good practice for both pedagogy and accessibility.

This resource is a guide on how to make OER more inclusive and representative of trans and gender diverse people. It is intended to be easily incorporated into a scholarly communications course, while also being valuable to faculty and others interested in learning about the topic and how to make changes to their own course materials.

Open education is grounded in Western understandings of ownership, protocol, and accessibility. Often open education has a goal of making all knowledges available for all peoples. Within Canadian copyright law is tension with Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The open education community must carefully consider Indigenous knowledges and self-determination, which are deeply rooted in community-defined ethics and protocols and do not fit into ordinary academic contexts. This session will explore some of the concerns around open educational resources (OER) and Indigenous knowledges while using Indigenous worldviews to better understand how Indigenous knowledges can be respectfully incorporated into OER.