Zero Textbook Cost Resources (ZTC/OER/LTC)

OER Defined: 

"'Open Educational Resources' are high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license, such as a Creative Commons license, that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and may include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students. 'Open educational resources' include, but are not limited to, full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, faculty-created content, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

Source: Section 67423 of the California Education Code (College Textbook Affordability Act of 2015)

OER MYTHBUSTING

OER Mythbusting addresses the top seven myths about OER in North American higher education, as voted on my more than 100 faculty, librarians, students and other members of the OER community. This project grew out of a discussion during one ofSPARC’s Libraries and OER Forum monthly calls, where a group of librarians from theU.S. and Canada identified a need for better resources to address misconceptions about OER. A team of volunteers developed a poll and distributed it over email lists and social media over a two week period in July 2017. The results were then used to produce this collaboratively written document.

Non-financial incentives about OER

1. By using OER, we can customize the course to match/fulfill the learning objectives/outcomes of the course in a way that a publisher text wouldn’t
2. Students report that they like hearing from a range of expert voices instead of just one voice and especially appreciate diversity in the readings. With textbooks, we generally hear voices with cultural power  
3. That expert voice can often be a marginalized group whose research doesn't float to the top because their voices have been blocked by dominant cultural narratives
4. Sometimes students make stress-driven decisions when the text is expensive (like trying to complete the course without the text or dropping the course or taking fewer courses). This speaks to an additional part of the equity component
5. Openly licensed materials open the conversation for us to talk about copyright with students (which we often neglect). When students understand more about the copyright they hold on their own work, they respect copyright on a new level and plagiarism reduces.
6. OER allows for the most current event examples to be used in classes where cultural and news-cycle references are relevant

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... This video is intended to serve as an introduction to OER for college professors.

Source: Adapted from Skyline College ZTC FAQ