About This Toolkit
Welcome to BCcampus Open Education’s OER Student Toolkit. This toolkit explains the benefits of OER and provides guidance on how students can help promote OER adoption.
BCcampus Open Education began in 2012 as the B.C. Open Textbook Project with the goal of making post-secondary education in British Columbia more accessible by reducing students’ costs through the use of open textbooks and other OER. BCcampus supports the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to enable powerful learning opportunities for the students of B.C. BCcampus Open Education is funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills & Training, and the Hewlett Foundation.
Open educational resources (OER) are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them. We consider this publication — along with our guides, webinar slide decks, and other support materials –as a type of OER that trains faculty, staff, and students how to understand, use, build, and customize open textbooks and other OER.
This toolkit does not come with an index. Instead, use the search field located in the top-right of each page in the online version to locate a specific topic.
The BCcampus Writing Guidelines for Style and Tone and BCcampus Open Education Style Guide, along with the attached style sheet [Word file] – to be added , were referenced during the copy editing and proofreading phases of this toolkit.
