About This Platform · OER Navigator · built for UFV Social Sciences

OER Navigator is a discovery platform that helps UFV Social Sciences faculty find, evaluate, and adopt open educational resources — at no cost to students, with transparent quality signals and a clear adoption workflow.

What it does

The platform holds a local catalog of open textbooks, modules, and collections drawn from BCcampus, OpenStax, LibreTexts, OER Commons, and other trusted repositories. Searches run instantly against this catalog — no external repository is queried at search time, and your course materials are never stored or logged.

Three ways to begin discovery

Guided searches (local catalog — no external AI): Course Lookup, Official Course Outline upload, and Substitution Search all query the platform's internal indexed catalog and return immediately.

Open exploration (local catalog): Keyword Search and Browse let you scan the full catalog freely, filtered by subject, source, licence, or reliability rating.

AI Discovery Leads (optional, external): An external AI model searches the live web for resources beyond the local catalog. These are unreviewed leads — licences, accessibility, and course fit must be confirmed independently before adoption.

How results are scored

Each result carries three independent signals, kept separate on purpose so you can weigh them for your context:

Topical fit — how well the resource's content vocabulary overlaps with your course description or outline. Reported as a confidence band (Strong / Promising / Partial / Weak / Review needed) rather than a raw number, to avoid implying more precision than the method supports.
Reliability rating — an advisory signal built from source credibility, licence clarity, currency, peer review status, completeness, accessibility signals, adoption data, and Canadian/Indigenous content. Where a verified third-party rating exists (e.g. Open Textbook Library faculty reviews), it is surfaced directly and never overwritten by the estimated signal.
Licence — shown plainly (CC BY, CC BY-NC-SA, etc.) so openness and remix rights are visible on every result card. You are responsible for confirming the licence permits your intended use before adopting.

Scores and ratings are decision supports, not certifications. They surface candidates worth reviewing — the professional judgment is yours.

Faculty tools

Scan report — a one-page printable summary of your course, top matches, a gap analysis, adoption options, and an estimated zero-textbook-cost (ZTC) savings figure. Designed for a department or curriculum-committee conversation.
Rejection reasons — when you reject a resource, you record why (wrong level, licence problem, outdated, insufficient coverage, etc.) so the signal is preserved rather than lost.
Collection evaluator — check an entire reading list against your syllabus, with redundancy and coverage-gap detection across multiple resources.
Course Reader Builder — assemble shortlisted resources into a structured, exportable collection with APA/MLA citations.

Human oversight, always

Nothing the platform produces is treated as a final answer. Scores are explained in plain language, confidence bands are deliberately coarse, and every save/reject/flag decision is recorded with a reason. The platform is built to support your judgment, not replace it. New catalogue-maintenance findings discovered by the background crawler never enter the live catalog without human approval.

Scope

The catalog currently covers 300+ courses across 13 Social Sciences subjects in the 2026/27 calendar at UFV — Anthropology (ANTH), Criminology (CRIM), Economics (ECON), Geography (GEOG), Global Development Studies (GDS), Indigenous Peoples Knowledges (IPK), Latin American Studies (LAS), Media and Communications Studies (MACS), Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), Political Science (POSC), Psychology (PSYC), Sociology (SOC), and Women's Studies (WMST). This is a deliberate pilot boundary, not a permanent limit.

What it doesn't do

It does not guarantee licence compliance or accessibility — it surfaces what is stated and flags gaps, but confirming suitability for your specific use is your responsibility.
It does not make adoption decisions — it provides structured information to support yours.
It does not replace a librarian conversation, especially for complex licensing questions or accessibility needs.
It does not expand beyond Social Sciences for this pilot — that scope boundary is deliberate, not permanent.

Faculty judgment remains central. The OER Navigator supports discovery and comparison. Final decisions about pedagogical fit, academic quality, accessibility, and licence suitability remain with the faculty member.

This is a UFV Social Sciences pilot covering selected subjects and courses. Results are intended to support exploration — not to represent a complete inventory of all suitable open resources. The absence of a resource here does not mean no suitable OER exists. For implementation details and the development roadmap, see Technical Notes.