2024 Funding to Address Priorities Using Open Educational Practices

In a recent survey of approximately 2,500 University of Saskatchewan (USask) students,  respondents indicated that an investment in open educational resources (OER) rated in the top five either “important” or “very important” areas USask should invest in. Similar results came from the 2022 survey. Over the past eight years, USask educators have increased the integration of open educational practices (OEP) at USask, including OER and open pedagogy, thus saving students more than $1.7 million during the 2023-2024 academic year.

In addition to these savings, students have created or contributed to Open Educational Resources (OER) in the form of open textbooks and learning materials for various community and campus organizations, generating engaging and authentic forms of assessment.

Embedding open educational practices into teaching and learning has many benefits, including the ability to localize content, give instructors greater control over the content within the learning materials, and make it easier to integrate institutional and program priorities into courses. This is possible because open educational practices allow instructors to shape the learning materials in ways that often cannot be done with commercial resources.

Finding time to work on the things already on your plate is challenging enough, so how can you take on something new? Open educational practices aren’t an additional task but a mechanism to address existing priorities.

Perhaps you would like to start, or further, Indigenizing your course content while also considering equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in your course. Open educational practices might allow you to make learning materials more representative of your students and teaching values.

You may be trying to adapt your assessment practices to align with the new USask Assessment Principles. Modifying existing assessments to an open pedagogy approach (students as creators and contributors instead of just consumers of knowledge) can help you meet that goal.

USask has many supports for instructors who want to engage in open educational practices, including:

USask, through the Gwenna Moss Centre has funding to support OER and open pedagogy projects. Money can go toward:

If you are interested in learning more about open educational resources, open pedagogy, or about accessing funding for such projects, please contact the Gwenna Moss Centre at  gmctl@usask.ca or Heather Ross at heather.ross@usask.ca