Zero Textbook Cost Resources (ZTC/OER/LTC)

LibreTexts is an Open Education Resource (OER) platform designed in partnership with the state of California. It's an easy-to-use platform designed to help you construct, customize, and share OER content. It boasts a number of useful features:

• One Minute import of OER content directly into Canvas
• Accessibility checker tool to use on new OER content
• Import OER content into LibreText from other websites
• Team-based project pages for collaborating on OER projects
• Direct chat access to LibreText staff for support
• Other LibreText Advanced Features such as:
  • Embedded multimedia
  • Dynamic Figures
  • Jupyter embedded programming code supporting Python, R, and Octave
  • Hypothesis annotation overlay for class-based collaboration
  • Affordable Print on Demand
  • ADAPT online homework platform

Moreno Valley College has partnered with LibreTexts to have our own MVC institutional repository page for OERs. Faculty can register their own LibreTexts account to create OER content.

There are a number of things you should consider before creating an OER:

• How will using OER improve your course? Critically evaluate your methods and alter them to better meet your needs.
• Who is your audience? Consider your audience and how this may effect the presentation of information.
• Does the OER you need already exist? Search existing OERs and consider contacting the Open Education Librarian (daniel.wilson@mvc.edu) for help finding OERs.
• How will you house and disseminate your OER? LibreTexts is a great platform for building and housing your OER content and provides easy importing into Canvas.
• How comfortable are you with evaluating the accessibility of your own work? Consider reviewing our OER Evaluation page for help.
• Do you have permission to use and share any third-party content you intend to include in the resource?
• Have you included attribution and license information for all third-party content included in your resource?

What type of Creative Commons license should you use?

The following Creative Commons license terms are suggested, but not required; along with these example Creative Commons statement (CC BY-NC 4.0 International):

•     4.0 International License: This is the most current, up-to-date version of the Creative Commons license
•     BY: Attribution required. People who re-use your content will have to give you credit
•     NC: Non-Commercial use only. People who re-use your content will not be able to sell or profit from it

We advise against using an ND or ‘No-Derivatives’ license, as this runs contrary to the purpose of Open Education Resources by preventing others from customizing or adapting your content.  

Example License Statement:

This work, authored by (replace the parenthesis and this text with your name, as a hyperlink if you have a web page to link to) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

Providing Attribution for OERs

CC BY is one of the most common types of Creative Commons licenses to see, as everyone wants to be credited for their work. PRoviding attribution is fairly simple. There are no hard legal requirements, but the common best practice is to provide:

• Title: The title of the work you shared or used
• Author: The author or creator of the work you shared or used
• Source: The source of the work you shared or used (a hyperlink will often
• suffice)
• License: The type of license (CC BY, CC BY-SA, etc.) that the work is licensed
• under

Example: "Physical Geography” by K. Allison Lenkeit-Meezan is licensed under CC
BY-NC 4.0.

The following tutorial videos provide a succinct, step-by-step overview of building an OER in LibreTexts. It examines the basics of building, editing, and publishing an OER Textbook.

1. Creating an Account
2. Building the New Project
3. Editing Your Project
4. Accessibility and Publishing

Bonus Video!: Collaborating with your Team.