Planning a Budget

The project considerations and templates from Elements of a Project Plan and Developing a Project Timeline should be completed before you can get a good sense of who you will need to budget for in the project and how much time you will need from them to complete their project tasks. Outlining your deliverables and milestones will give you a good sense of the ramp-up times where more hours may be needed or used by specific team members, while the project timeline will give you a sense of when the individuals would be hired into the project.

Project Team

Open educational resources are free to use but not free to create. A lot of time and effort will go into creating an open text and some of that effort may require funding for the expertise and time of a project member. As discussed in Identifying Your Project Team, it’s important to know who you need on your project team and when you may need to draw those individuals from outside of your immediate project. Additionally, the type of expertise will require different kinds of funding levels.

Project Team Training

Understanding the workflows, processes, and planning needed to develop an open text will make your project run smoothly; however, understanding all the steps to create an open text may require training for your project team. While the training is available as in-kind support to UBC faculty, staff, and students, the training time for your project team members should be included in your budget requests. Training needed for most open text creation projects include:

• Finding, using, and adapting OER
• Copyright and open licensure
• Tracking attributions and terms of use and citation
• Sharing and making OER findable to internal and external communities
• Creating with Pressbooks
• Style, structure, and learning design for open texts
• Accessibility and inclusivity for OER

Each of these training sessions is approximately 1-1.5 hours each and may require additional consultation time. Make sure to plan your budget with training needs in mind.

Building an open text inside of Pressbooks entails tasks that are more administrative rather than creative (i.e. writing the text). Many open text projects fail to add enough time to the construction phase of the project, causing difficulties when the written content is loaded and organized in Pressbooks. The following outlines the types of tasks you may need to budget for your open text construction.

The estimated time is based on the use of the templates and practices outlined in this guide. The estimated time is based on projects that have used the practices guides and templates in this guide. Without using the structured approach illustrated in this guide, the time estimates for the construction of your open text will increase.

The following outlines the types of tasks needed for the categories of the open text publishing project time estimates and finding and using open education resources.

Develop a Budget

There are a number of templates and cost estimate resources drawing from salaries and wages identified through UBC. While your project may need to draw from outside of the institution, using these resources as a starting point to develop your budget will help provide you with an overall budget estimate that then can be refined. Once you have identified your timelines, team members, training needs, and open text construction tasks, use the budget cost estimates from the OER Fund application page for hourly estimates by employee type.

Additional estimated rates for hiring UBC staff can be found on the TLEF Budget Considerations guide.