Science Literacy Week: CLIMATE

Science Literacy Week is a national, weeklong initiative that aims to highlight the diversity of Canadian science. Each year libraries, museums, science centres, schools, and not-for-profits celebrate a certain aspect in science by featuring books, films, events, and workshops around a specific theme. This year, Science Literacy Week has partnered with Environment and Climate Change Canada to explore CLIMATE. 

Here in the Okanagan, where our summers are sometimes full of smoke from wildfires and the desert-like landscape often suffers from drought, climate is an extremely important and relevant aspect to our lives.

Okanagan-specific Books, Films, and Resources

How does climate and climate change affect us in the Okanagan? How can we make a difference? Check out the resources in this Okanagan-specific guide!

Climate & Climate Change in the Okanagan

Find more resources:

Climate Change  SLW at UBC

Book Displays & Activities

UBC Library has plenty of books, films, and other resources about Climate. Browse the books on display and check out the activities on the main floor of UBC Okanagan Library from September 20-26.

Here are some of our recommendations

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren
Borrow it

The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

Borrow it

More Powerful Together: conversations with climate activists and Indigenous land defenders by Jen Gobby

Borrow it

Looking for a book or film about climate that we don’t have in our collections? Let us know!

Suggest a Book

Virtual Workshops

Getting started with Citizen Science: a survey of tools and projects

Civic Engagement in the Climate Emergency Workshop

There are many ways to become involved in politics, but it can be challenging to identify opportunities. This workshop examines civic engagement and provides a brief overview of opportunities to get involved, with a special focus on climate justice work in municipal governments in British Columbia.

Wednesday, September 22
Time: 10:00am – 11:30am

Learn more & register

Thinking through the crap: How to think critically about science in the media – Presented by The (Un)Scientific Method

This session will cover:

• Hands-on critical analysis of controversial science topics
• Discussing how our biases may influence the way we read science media
• Developing a strategy to critically evaluate science media

Thursday, September 23
Time: 1 pm – 2 pm

Learn more and Register

Find more UBC-wide Science Literacy Week events.

Local Events and Initiatives 

Waterways: Take a deep dive into the human relationship with water.
Kelowna Museum is featuring Waterways from September 18-January 29

Waterways

Climate Action: Learn how you can take action against climate change locally.

City of Kelowna Climate Action

This report makes projections on how the Okanagan is affected by climate change.

Okanagan Climate Projections

With campus resumption just around the corner, now is a great time to make sure your unit’s records are as organized as they can be. Following good records management practices and retention schedules ensures that your records will be findable, accessible, and able to meet your business needs. The Okanagan Records Management Office can offer vault space for your records boxes, and consultation services for the organization of your digital records. To learn more, contact Stephanie Plumb at stephanie.plumb@ubc.ca.

Project title: Introductory Thermodynamics: an open textbook for engineering undergraduate students
Project Lead:  Claire Yan (UBCO Faculty, Engineering)
Project team: Amaiya Khardenavis (UBCO MASc student) and with support from: Donna Langille (Librarian, UBCO), Erin Fields (Librarian, UBCV), Claire Swanson (Open Education, UBCV) and Kristen Morgen (CTL, UBCO)

Background on the Open Educational Resource (OER) project.
This project aims to create an open textbook on introductory engineering thermodynamics, which will be published on Pressbooks with Creative Commons license. Over the past few years, UBCO Engineering faculty member, Dr. Claire Yan, has developed learning modules while teaching thermodynamics. Building upon these learning modules, the proposed open textbook will be tailor-made to contain the most fundamental topics of classical thermodynamics suitable for an entry-level undergraduate course and revised to ensure all materials, including tables and graphs, have an open license. In addition, this project will create interactive H5P questions for each chapter of the open textbook intended for students to practice key concepts and perform self-assessment.

Why go Open?
Several years ago, Dr. Yan used an online homework system provided by a book publisher in one of her courses. Students were required to purchase the ebook and the associated code. From students’ feedback, she realized that more than half of the class felt that the ebook was too expensive for a single course. This incident gave her insight on students’ differing social-economic situations. From then on, Dr. Yan looked for ways to not only help students learn effectively, but to make learning materials more affordable. During her search, she came across BC Campus, open education, and Pressbooks. As this open textbook will be published on Pressbooks with a Creative Commons License, other authors and users can freely download the book and reuse or remix the content to suit their course or learning needs.

Project Impact for UBCO Students, Staff, and Faculty?
Thermodynamics is a fundamental subject in many engineering, physics and chemistry disciplines. The outcome of this project will be an open textbook with sufficient content coverage for an entry-level, three-credit, one-term engineering thermodynamics course. Upon its completion, the open textbook can be adopted in APSC 252 Thermodynamics, which typically has an enrolment of about 400. The open textbook created through this project can also be used by upper-year engineering students as a refresher.

This project will allow instructors to transition from commercial textbooks to OER. Being open sourced, the content of the proposed open textbook may be remixed, reused or updated by a broader teaching and learning community in engineering and sciences. The benefit to students is a more concise and freely-accessible alternative to expensive commercial textbooks, which will help reduce the financial stress to many students.

Advice from the team for those considering OERs
Searching for open repositories and Pressbooks formatting takes time. Thankfully, Donna (UBCO Library), Erin (UBC Library), Claire (Open Education), and Kristen (CTL) have supported me by providing necessary resources. More and more people, both instructors and students are joining the community. There are more resources and support than you may think. If you have an idea, make it happen!

Learn more about the Open Educational Resources Grant Program.

Explore other grant funded OER project spotlights: 

Context-Embedded Guided-Inquiry Learning Modules for Large Introductory Chemistry Courses

Introducing Ainu Content to Japanese Language Students

Fostering best practices in reproducible analyses

Project title: Fostering best practices in reproducible analyses across the biology curriculum
Project lead: Jason Pither (UBCO Faculty, Biology)
Project team: Mathew Vis-Dunbar (Librarian), Clerissa Copeland (BSc Hons.), Sharon Hanna (Support Analyst)

Background on the Open Educational Resource (OER) project.
Using the biology program as a pilot venue, the team is building open educational resources (OERs) that will support the development and application of reproducible lab assignment/experiment workflows by students, and through web-based, interactive network diagrams, highlight how biology courses across the curriculum are connected through common learning outcomes, particularly those related to study designs, statistical analyses, and workflows.

The connections will include short vignettes that will describe the nature of the connection and reinforce the focal learning outcomes, and provide common pitfalls (related to the topic) and their solutions relative to reproducibility. All materials used in the development of reproducible lab assignments and network mapping, including all outputs from these, will be made openly available for others to draw upon.

Why go Open?
A fundamental tenet of the scientific method is replicability: research protocols and outcomes should be fully replicable by independent researchers. In reality, the majority of scientific research cannot be replicated due to a combination of insufficient transparency and openness, poor study design, and flawed statistical analyses.

Efforts to address this “reproducibility crisis” are gaining momentum through the “open science” (OS) movement, but these efforts rarely target training undergraduate students. This is a missed opportunity as graduates of science programs could help push the culture change that is required to solve the reproducibility crisis, and ultimately make the science upon which public policy is based more sound.

The OER grant is helping the team to introduce, in a meaningful and connected way, practices and theories in scientific reproducibility, transparency, and rigour. Further, it is an opportunity to demonstrate similar approaches to the development of tools to support teaching and learning.

Project Impact for UBCO Students, Staff, and Faculty?
These resources will help to build discrete connections about core concepts, allowing students to clearly see how activities and processes in one class or lab are revisited and built upon in other classes and lab, providing a window into the undergraduate biology program in its entirety. This will also allow instructors and lab managers to harmonize their content, approach, assignments, and terminology across the program.

Additionally, it offers up, at the program level, the opportunity to learn not just how to do a given task in science, but an emphasis that is routinely reinforced, on the underlying principles of the scientific method, preparing them either as better future researchers, or engaged citizens with strong scientific literacies to inform how they engage in daily life.

Advice from the team for those considering OERs
It can be challenging to think of these classroom resources becoming living entities requiring continual updates, potentially in a collaborative manner, and the amount of time and effort one needs to invest for these to be successful. Grants like these OER grants are allowing us to tackle this in small, manageable chunks. We recognize that a key to success is to select a set of priorities to pick away at as opposed to having to re-imagine the full learning experience and the role of OERs in that experience overnight or in the scope of a single term.

Being able to co-develop classroom learning materials with students who have or are taking those courses provides invaluable insights into how content is interpreted by our learners. It’s an amazing learning opportunity for everyone involved, and has the potential, through release of these materials as OERs, to get undergraduate students building an academic CV.

Learn more
Learn more about the Open Educational Resources Grant Program and other grant funded OER project spotlights:
Context-Embedded Guided-Inquiry Learning Modules for Large Introductory Chemistry Courses
Introducing Ainu Content to Japanese Language Students

Project title: Introducing Ainu Content to Japanese Language Students
Project Lead:  Nina Langton (UBCO Faculty)
Project team: Mayu Takasaki (UBCO Lecturer) and Saki Irie (UBCO Student)

Background on the Open Educational Resource (OER) project.
The Ainu are the Indigenous people of Japan, but many students of the Japanese language are not aware of their existence. As a way of contributing to the university’s commitment to engage in reconciliation by promoting knowledge of Indigenous cultures and histories, the aim of this project is to introduce and deepen students’ awareness of Ainu history, culture and oral traditions, both past and present. The OER Grant provides an opportunity to jump-start, in a concrete way, Nina Langton’s intention to indigenize the Japanese language curriculum and share those efforts with not only students, but other educators as well.

These materials will include level-appropriate reading selections on Ainu history (particularly since colonization), descriptions of traditional and current culture and lifestyle, as well as interactive learning activities to accompany the readings. Although making culturally sensitive materials using unmediated Ainu voices in challenging, a network of Ainu artists and teachers have been providing some helpful guidance on this project.

Project Impact
These materials will provide the opportunity for students to reflect on both the negative impact of colonialism within Japan and the revitalization of the vibrant Ainu culture. In addition, the goal of this project is for students to gain an awareness of and respect for the diversity of peoples within Japan, instead of seeing contemporary Japan only as a homogeneous culture.

This OER project will include materials adapted and created with Creative Commons Open Licenses so that other Japanese language instructors can use them to add Indigenous content to their own classes.

Advice from the project lead for those considering OERs
Although it may feel a little scary to put something out into the world and not be able to control how someone else might use it, contributing to creative collaboration is very satisfying.

Going through the university guidelines for creating OER materials has made me more aware of the importance of accessibility and the concept of Universal Design, which is not only valuable for this OER project, but for teaching and for creating learning materials in general.

In addition, I’ve gained greater appreciation for the challenges involved in creating original material and for the benefits of making that material freely available.

Explore more:
Learn more about the Open Educational Resources Grant Program and other grant funded OER project spotlights.

Project title: Context-Embedded Guided-Inquiry Learning Modules for Large Introductory Chemistry Courses

Project team: W. Stephen McNeil, Tamara K. Freeman, Riley J. Petillion

Background on the Open Educational Resource project.
UBC Okanagan chemistry professors Dr. McNeil and Dr. Freeman and PhD student Riley J. Petillion developed a series of guided-inquiry learning modules for use as small-group activities in large introductory chemistry classes. These activities are designed to reinforce content-based cognitive outcomes and to develop affective outcomes involving learner attitudes and beliefs regarding the roles of chemistry in society. Students are guided through a series of prompts requiring application of concepts from multiple course topics within the context of a societal issue or problem.

Student feedback on earlier iterations of these learning activities suggests that they are largely achieving their intended goals; however, the current form demands initial assimilation of large amounts of written information, detracting from the active learning experience in the classroom

The goal of the OER project is to undertake a revision of each of these learning resource modules in order to create a final, publicly-available resource to be released on multiple platforms in an editable format.

Project Impact
Since these learning resources are being used in courses at UBC Okanagan, students are already benefiting from zero-cost educational instructional videos and learning activities. However, this project is serving as the impetus to finalize revisions and provide these learning activities with an improved structure. This is an initial step in a longer-term plan to develop and utilize OER with the eventual goal of replacing the current use of textbooks for the first-year chemistry courses at UBCO. The learning activities being developed in this project will form a significant part of the total course package.

Advice from this team for those considering OERs
If you expect that a learning resource will be utilized as OER, consider that during its initial development and creation. The intended audience is not just your own students in your own class, but students in many different educational contexts. This means that your resources cannot rely on, make use of content from, or refer to information in any other specific textbook or other resource.

Learn more about the Open Educational Resources Grant Program and other grant funded OER projects.

UBCO Library is hiring a Project Records Manager to work alongside Records Manager and Archivist Paige Hohmann. One of their responsibilities will be the oversight of a portion of UBCO’s digital records governance projects. The objective of this program is to reorganize a campus unit’s shared drive to bring it in line with electronic records management best practices. This program has proven to be so popular that the demand warrants expanding it! We hope that the Project Records Manager role will increase records management capacity this summer. If your unit is considering a digital governance project, get in touch with Stephanie.plumb@ubc.ca for more details!

The Records Storage program, located within Okanagan Special Collections on the bottom floor of the Commons, is operational. Staff are regularly on campus and can accommodate any box transfers or access requests you have, though they will be subject to some special safety considerations due to Covid. They have also officiated the new records management database O’Neil for more efficient tracking of your box transactions.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to process a box transfer or access your records in storage! See the updated website for all forms, instructions and safety protocols.
Records Storage Program

The beginning of a new fiscal year has arrived, and the records management team wants to remind you that now is a good time to catch up on your records housekeeping. Is there a filing cabinet that no one has cleaned out in recent memory? Now is a great time to do some weeding. Are there records that haven’t met their retention stacking up in a forgotten corner of the office? Email Stephanie.plumb@ubc.ca for guidance on how to box records and have them delivered to the ORMO’s storage vault.

The Okanagan Records Management Program will oversee an annual shred day in May, where all boxes of records in our program for which retention has expired will be marked for destruction. Don’t worry – we are careful to get permission from department heads before putting any box into the shred queue.

We would love to hear from you with any questions or comments you may have!

Records Management Services