In the spring of 2024, the four Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, through the Council of Atlantic Ministers of Education and Training (CAMET), invested in a 3-year pilot program to support efforts to increase the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the Atlantic Region. The Council of Atlantic Academic Libraries (CAAL-CBPA) has used this funding to support this goal by expanding the AtlanticOER Service for publicly funded post-secondary institutions across the Atlantic region. In this first year of the pilot program, AtlanticOER has already achieved many goals and made a positive impact on students in the Atlantic Region.

AtlanticOER Development Grant Program

With funding from the government, the AtlanticOER Development Grant Program expanded. The Grant Program now features 3 different tiers of funding, each of which reflects a different scale of a project.

In the past, AtlanticOER has given out 5 grants worth $2,000 each for a total of $10,000. In 2024, we offered a total of 9 grants ranging in value from $3,500 to $7,000 for a total amount of over $45,000. These larger scale grants will ensure that recipients have sufficient funding to make a full and interactive OER that can have a positive impact on student learning.

Expansion of Pressbooks Publishing Platform

Pressbooks is an open book publishing software commonly used to produce OERs. With the funding from the pilot project, educators in the Atlantic Region have access to new features including:

• The ability to create an unlimited number of books each year;
• An LTI integration that allows educators to embed their books in their institutional learning management software (LMS) and also to more easily provide access for students to OERs subject to Indigenous cultural protocols around how they can be shared; and
• Pressbooks Results, which enables the pass back of grades to the LMS for any H5P activities, such as end of chapter quizzes, when a book is embedded in the LMS.

Increase in Impact on Students

In the past year, the number of OERs created has greatly increased. As each new OER is created, the impact on students continues to grow. In 2024, we saw the following impact:

• 28 new OER in progress
• 49 OER published to date
• 37,150 learners impacted by OER
• $2,095,882 in student savings

Future Goals

In 2025, we hope to take the momentum built in the first year of the pilot and accomplish the following:

• Create more resources for educators who are interested in learning more about OER and creating their own OER.
• Launch a Peer Review system to facilitate reviews of OER.

This year has seen significant positive impact for students in the Atlantic Region in improving access to course textbooks and other course materials. Many now have access to courses with zero textbook costs, and others now have access to course materials where before there were no suitable course materials. As these open resources continue to be developed and used in postsecondary courses in the region, the positive impact will continue to grow exponentially.