Welcome to the BCcampus Open Education Working Group Guide.

We consider this publication—along with our guides, toolkits, webinar slide decks, and other support materials—an open educational resource (OER). OER are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by their creator, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them. BCcampus Open Education views its support resources as openly licensed educational tools that train the trainer—typically faculty and staff—on how to build, customize, and use open textbooks and use open educational practices.

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.

The BCcampus Writing Guidelines for Articles and Web Content and the attached Style Sheet [Word File] were referenced during the copy editing and proofreading phases of this guide.

To ensure that standard barriers are addressed for maximum access by as many readers as possible, this guide meets the criteria laid out in the Checklist for Accessibility—including an Accessibility Statement—and is flagged as “Accessible” in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection.

This guide 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.