Moreno Valley College considers reducing textbook costs for students to be a highly important initiative. It's also particularly important to provide customizable course content that can be edited to better include voices and perspectives relevant to our students. Open Education Resources (OERs: teaching and learning resources that have been released under an open license permitting their free use and editing or re-purposing by other creators ["Open Education" licensed CC BY by Creative Commons]) are an important part of this initiative. As such, Creative Commons licensing is also very important to providing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) courses.
Creative Commons (CC) "licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law" ("About CC Licenses" licensed CC BY by Creative Commons). CC licenses are the simplest way to create OERs that enrich and diversify educational content. These licenses make that content easy to share and distribute with other educators. Creative Commons highly values an open sharing of information and that helps make it ideal for providing open educational content.
At MVC, we strive to provide as many ZTC courses as we can and many educators work diligently to offer zero cost course content. But how does this work? There are several steps in the process:
MVC and the Riverside Community College District are very supportive of faculty efforts to convert courses to ZTC; however, there is not much money available to pay faculty for that work. Many faculty take on easier conversion projects for free but it's important to ensure reasonable compensation where possible. CMAC and the Open Education Librarian work to identify and apply for grants that can help fund these projects! The Open Education Librarian also works to promote our OER and ZTC efforts.
Ideally, we want to create Open Educational Resources that can not only turn our courses Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC), but which can be shared with other educators and help create ZTC courses at other schools. This ideal is shared by both the state and by the Creative Commons organization. However, creating educational resources as OERs is not the only way to create a ZTC course. Remember, to be OER, course materials must be free, accessible, shareable, and editable. That requires certain licenses (often Creative Commons licenses) that allow other people to access, distribute, and edit your work!
It's often easier for faculty to create zero-cost content within their Canvas and not to license and publish it publicly. Creating an OER means not only selecting a license, but also using technology to host it on a public location. While this sort of work in Canvas creates ZTC courses, it does not create OERs. Furthermore, many newer grants to fund ZTC projects are requiring the creation of OERs.
MVC is working on a number of initiatives to help address this problem:
A key part of this work involves engaging with faculty, students, and administration on a regular basis. The Course Materials Affordability Committee works to directly connect with faculty and includes a member of the Associated Students of MVC as well. The Open Education Librarian regularly meets with faculty and different academic departments to discuss ZTC and OER efforts; as well as the needs of the college. However, student voices and demands are often some of the most influential. We work to share information on ZTC and OER in order to ensure students know what these efforts are and hopefully to help engage students in the ongoing discussions. We also implement annual student and faculty surveys to get feedback on our efforts. Students can also further the discussion by talking about their desire for more Zero Textbook Cost courses, gaining an understanding of OER, wearing ZTC buttons, and providing feedback on courses and course materials.
This page is licensed CC BY 4.0 International by Daniel Wilson
Moreno Valley College's faculty have been hard at work converting courses into zero textbook cost. This data shows how we're doing compared to the rest of the Riverside Community College District.
*This data is based on courses reported as ZTC in the course schedule. We have more courses than these that are ZTC and need to ensure courses are accurately reported in the course schedule.
