Be `open' to an affordable college education

“Open” is the key word for Alberta this summer. Come fall, college and university students across Alberta will be keen to see how the provincial government lives up to another promise for open — open educational resources or OER.

This past spring, as part of the Alberta 2030 post-secondary strategy, the Government of Alberta committed to making educational resources more accessible by supporting free openly licensed textbooks and other educational materials. While the Alberta 2030 document sets this objective, lacking are details on how it will achieve this.

Those details are particularly timely, given rising tuition costs at post-secondary institutions across the province. As students bear more costs for their education, support for OER is a proven cost-saver. In British Columbia, where the provincial government has been supporting OER since 2012, B.C. students have saved over $24 million in textbook costs.

In 2014, the Alberta government funded the provincial OER initiative — a pilot project designed to promote OER in the province. This program was eventually ended, but the Alberta OER archive is still available. Open textbook adoptions were projected to save students $5.5 million over five years.

The government could make meaningful progress on open education in Alberta over the next 18 months.

Here are three steps the government could take: Reinstate the Alberta OER initiative by providing a modest annual grant: The money could be used to fund OER projects throughout the province. The majority of the funds should be distributed as small grants, to fund educators who want to develop OER materials for their classes. The remaining funds could be used to track student savings and prevent duplication by encouraging co-ordination and co-operation across the province. Recruit educators to volunteer on the Alberta

OER initiative: The previous initiative comprised many volunteers from the post-secondary sector, and there are many skilled people across the province who would be willing to administer the grant and plan OER related events.

Develop partnerships with other provinces: There are numerous OER initiatives going on in B.C., Ontario, and in Atlantic Canada. Through establishing partnerships, Alberta could benefit from the knowledge, expertise, and already-made OER that other groups have.

These three steps would go a long way toward advancing OER in Alberta. Given the high return on investment that OER brings, this relatively small investment would recoup itself through student cost savings at a time when Alberta families need all the savings they can get.

A transformative longterm goal for the coming decade would be to fund a provincial, cross-institution OER co-ordinating and funding body. Such a program would allow institutions to share previously made OER across the province, it would reduce education costs for the over 250,000 post-secondary students in Alberta, and it would help eliminate the competitive gap to other provinces such as Ontario and B.C. that already have their own provincial OER programs.

Encouraging instructors to develop OER relevant to the

Alberta context is also crucial. One considerable step would be to add OER creation/adoption into promotion and tenure agreements for teachers in post-secondary.

We believe that a small ongoing investment from the government would positively impact education in Alberta. Given that Alberta has already had (and defunded) a provincial OER initiative, resurrecting such a program would be a feasible and timely enterprise.

We would be happy to work with all stakeholders — including the government and post-secondary institutions — on these proposals. We are going to continue to develop a more detailed project plan to expand open education in Alberta, and we're happy to share our work with any interested party. Chaten D. Jessel, faculty of science representative, University of Calgary Students' Union science3@su.ucalgary.ca Erik Christiansen, assistant professor/ librarian, Mount Royal University echristiansen@mtroyal.ca Michael Mcnally, associate professor, faculty of education, University of Alberta mmcnally@ualberta.ca