Open Education

The Langara Open Student Scholar Prize

Important Dates

Applications for the 2024 Langara Open Student Scholar Prize are now closed.

Detailed information about the application process is provided below.

About the Langara Open Student Scholar Prize

In 2020, the Langara Library, Open Langara, and the Langara Institutional Repository (The LaIR) introduced the Langara Open Student Scholar Prize. This prize celebrates exemplary work being done by Langara students and offers them the opportunity to share their work in an open access format.

Institutional repositories like The LaIR provide a platform for scholars to make their work accessible to a wide audience, enabling knowledge sharing and creation on a larger scale. The LaIR captures unique digital output from Langara's students, faculty, staff, and community and provides a digital space to store and share scholarly production, projects, learning objects, art, and any number of digitized or digitally born resources.

Awards

Prizes will be awarded to the top three projects evaluated by our team of judges. All winning projects will be published in the LaIR's Open Student Scholar Prize Collection.

Winners will also be awarded a gift certificate to their choice of one of three businesses:

• First place: $250
• First Runner Up: $150
• Second Runner Up: $100

Eligibility

To be eligible for the Langara Open Student Scholar Prize, students must:

• Be enrolled at Langara College during the Spring 2024 academic semester.  
• Have completed a project for a class that required research no earlier than Spring 2022 (projects must not be more than 2 years old). Course assignments, research papers, or other scholarly or creative projects are accepted for consideration. Projects can be in any format or medium.
• Agree to publish their submission to the Langara Institutional Repository.  
• Agree to have their open statement published, in part or in full, anonymously for marketing purposes. 

This contest is open to both individual and group projects.

Nomination or recommendation from a faculty member is not required but welcomed. Instructors interested in nominating a student work should encourage students to fill out the Entry Form. Additional comments about the work can be sent to Rebecca Slaven or Lindsay Tripp.

Application process

To be considered for the prize, please include the following: 

1. A completed Entry Form (including name, student number, class, etc. for follow-up).
2. A short statement (250-500 words) about what open education, open access, and open scholarship means to you, your project, and/or post-secondary education at large. 
3. The final version of your completed project, including a bibliography, works cited, or references page.  
   • Atypical project formats (i.e. visual art, films, multimedia presentations) must be accompanied by a statement that describes the research and creation process, including a bibliography.  

Criteria

Projects submitted for this award must be exemplary work, largely free of spelling and grammatical errors, and completed as a requirement of their studies at Langara College. They must include some element of research and analysis. 

The prizes will be awarded primarily on the quality of the project and the short statement about the impact of open education. 

The judging committee will consist of representatives from the Library, the English Department, and the Scholarly Activities Steering Committee.

Entries should be proofread before submission but may be copy edited before submission to the LaIR. 

Entries will be judged using the following rubric: