Whereas, The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, in its 2020 Zero-Textbook-Cost Degree Grant Program Legislative Report, has recommended that future zero-textbook-cost (ZTC) funding should focus on investment priorities, including efforts to do the following:
- Evaluate existing ZTC programs and courses and incorporate culturally relevant content to contribute to advancing equity in teaching and learning;
- Share and adopt existing quality ZTC program and course materials, especially within the same community college district;
- Develop and curate quality ZTC materials for courses that satisfy general education requirements; and
- Post ZTC program courses on the California Virtual Campus Course Exchange and quickly make ZTC programs and courses available to all California community college students;
Whereas, The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) “recognize[s] open educational resources as the preferred and most sustainable mechanism for eliminating course costs” (Resolution 3.05 F21);
Whereas, Resources may only be modified, developed, curated, and freely shared when those resources are openly licensed, and the ASCCC “encourage[s] the establishment of support structures for OER development that require developed resources to be openly licensed and made available to expand the diversity of OER resources” (Resolution 9.05 S19); and
Whereas, California Education Code §78052 requires that “All open educational resources used as learning materials for a degree developed pursuant to this section shall be added to the California Digital Open Source Library established in Section 66408,” yet no public-facing information is available that delineates how colleges that established ZTC certificates and degrees did so, and the list of ZTC degrees developed reveals duplication of resources and degree pathways (Zero-Textbook-Cost Degree Grant Program Legislative Report, CCCCO 2020);
Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges urge the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to require that all recipient colleges and districts of zero-textbook-cost (ZTC) funds delineate how ZTC status was achieved for all courses in a given pathway in a designated public-facing location and ensure that openly-licensed resources are shared as required by law; and
Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges encourage the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to support the development of a repository for the sharing of open educational resources used to establish zero-textbook-cost certificates and degrees that can be searched by specific course parameters as defined by faculty.
MSC