The goal of this guide is to educate faculty about strategies to reduce textbook and course material costs and its benefit to student equity and success. It is designed as a resource for information about openly licensed course materials.
See the information below on this page for more about what is OER and ZTC (and it differences).
This guide has lists of suggested open educational resources repositories, both general and by subject. The goal is to promote no cost learning materials for faculty selection by reducing the time you spend searching for materials that you can legally use for your courses.
This guide is NOT a complete list of OER repositories.
This site is in progress! If you are using an OER that you would like to be listed here, email me at williak2@arc.losrios.edu
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.*
The 5 R's of OERs are: **
OERs vs. Free Library Materials vs. Commercial Textbooks
** Creative Commons Certificate Course Unit 5.2
*** picture Creative Commons Certificate Course Unit 5.2
The Zero Textbook Cost logo is a logo that shows up in the class schedule indicating which courses do not have any textbook costs. This is a California State law through SB 1359.
If you want to read SB 1359 or any other related information, the Affordable Educational Resources Committee at SCC compiled a "manifesto" of all things OER, which includes laws related to OERs.
No cost for course materials such as:
Usually does not include items such as:
A course does not have to be using openly licensed course materials to get the ZTC logo, but the logo does require that the cost for course materials is free.