Yes! One aim of OER is to help students achieve their educational goals without the additional expense of textbook costs (which amount to $2 billion nationally). While all digital OER are free, some OER are also available in print at low cost.
OER are often released under intellectual property licenses (such as, Creative Commons). Some of these licenses allow faculty to freely reuse, remix, revise, and/or redistribute educational materials. There are other free educational resources in the public domain, but they are not considered OER since they require permission from the copyright holder in order to be redistributed or modified.
To learn more about the different types of Creative Commons licenses:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
CC-BY licenses are the most flexible because they allow for the remixing, modification, and distribution of the work, as long as the original author is credited. For more on CC-BY: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/4818
This graphic depicts the different licenses in terms of whether they are more open or restricted.
The best course of action is for faculty to include a representative textbook commonly accepted as a required text on the COR. Faculty use the traditionally accepted textbook as guide when choosing OERs that best align with the representative text on the COR. Per, The COR: A Curriculum Reference Guide Revisited, pg. 34, “OER materials should be vetted by faculty in the discipline prior to adoption as required materials.”
How to reference an OER:
If you use an OER textbook resource as a bibliographic reference, at a minimum the textbook reference should include the list below (1-6).
CSU & UC need the publication date and revision date if appropriate.
Additional information that can be added if available includes, “Copyright holder.” This information can be added at the end of the reference.
1. Author: e.g., OpenStax
2. Name : e.g., Biology
3. Publisher: e.g., OpenStax CNX
4. Publication Date
5. Link/course ID
6. Licensed by/under
For example:
OpenStax, Biology. OpenStax CNX. Oct 21, 2016 http://cnx.org/contents/185cbf87-c72e-48f5-b51e-f14f21b5eabd@10.61. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
The Grossmont AFT contract protects faculty’s academic freedom, including the freedom to choose which materials to assign in their courses. Title 5 (as it relates to curriculum) is broad and does not specify that faculty must use print textbooks published by for-profit publishers.
CSU & UC GE Transferability (Policy Updated Nov. 2016): Proposed courses should include at least one textbook. Reviewers use the representative text as a way to confirm their understanding of course content. It’s understood that the instructor in a given section may choose a different text, but the proposed one is still given close attention. It’s expected that the structure of the text will be consistent with the course outline. Including additional reading is a good way to demonstrate that multiple points of view will be evaluated, as a means of developing critical thinking. Texts don’t need to be published in hard copy. The UC and CSU welcome the use of online texts and other Open Educational Resources, so long as the resource is a stable, bona fide publicly available as a published textbook, and not just a collection of links to lecture notes or other web pages.
Notes Regarding Course-to-Course Articulation: CSU and UC campus departments consider the content of textbooks when reviewing course-to-course articulation proposals and course outlines of record (COR) from the California Community Colleges (CCC).
The use of online texts is reviewed by UC campuses on a case-by-case basis for articulation with the CCCs. Texts, both online and traditional, must be dated within seven years for most course submissions.
OER include a wide range of resources: entire online courses, modules, online textbooks, articles, videos, assessments (e.g. quizzes, tests), lesson plans, audio files, etc. While some OER include supplementary materials (e.g. test banks), others do not. If supplementary materials are important to you, then you may need to search more to find an adequate OER or you could contribute your own supplementary materials.
OER, open educational resources, are defined as teaching and learning materials that are either in the public domain, or created and distributed under an open license which allows them to be revised, remixed, retained, redistributed, or reused. OER are free for students in digital form, and in many cases can be printed for a fraction of what commercial resources cost to buy.
ZTC stands for "zero textbook cost" and is applied to courses in which faculty either use OER, or other freely available resources in place of traditional textbooks or other expensive learning materials. California SB 1359 established the following parameters for what constitutes a ZTC course:
Other considerations for ZTC courses include:
Yes, the Grossmont College OER/ZTC task force has recently begun collecting a nukber of statistics related to the ZTC courses offered on Campus. Below are some results from the Fall 2019 semester:
To learn more, contact a member of the OER/ZTC task force found under the Contact Us page on this website.
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