If you’re new to open education jargon, you might be wondering what all the talk around OERs is about. As an open-access publisher with a stake in the OER game, we’re here to break it down for you and share our latest OER project with you.
An OER is an open educational resource. OERs are free online textbooks designed to reduce the cost of education and create flexibility in learning. One OER initiative that AU Press in currently involved with is the Campus Alberta OER Initiative. This initiative comes from the signing of a memorandum between British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan that recognizes “the benefits of sharing existing Open Education Resources with a focus on mutual areas of interest.”
The Campus Alberta OER Initiative set out to fund the production of worthwhile learning material that could be made available as a free resource. Jason Foster and Bob Barnetson’s textbook Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces was selected to receive this funding. They then brought the book to AU Press and we took it through our usual process: peer review, copyediting, typesetting, and publication. The result is a high quality learning resource (in our OPEL series) intended for workers and students looking for an introduction to injury prevention on the job.
To see the rest of the Alberta OER funded projects, visit their website. And to download this one, visit the AU Press website.
