Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) and Low Textbook Cost (LTC) Courses save MJC students thousands of dollars, increasing student access and promoting student success through the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and other instructional materials. Generally, required course learning resources are provided to students, usually using digital resources, in place of a traditional textbook at no cost.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free resources that instructors curate or create on their own to teach their courses. Open means the permission to freely download, edit, and share materials to better serve all students. OER can be produced to the same quality standards as traditional textbooks. The MJC OER Research Guide, developed locally by Librarian Iris Carroll, is a great resource for learning about the OER process and implementation:
Take a look at the collection of curated content from MJC's faculty on OER Commons.
OER are about creation, collaboration, and academic freedom. It’s about not changing your pedagogy to accommodate traditional textbooks but rather developing instructional materials to accommodate your teaching approach. Faculty can also take advantages of OER to include voices that have been historically marginalized in academia.
Most modern educational resources—from textbooks to lectures—start out as digital files before being converted into other formats including (but not limited to) print and audio. The same goes for OER. Most OER start out as digital, but can be used in a wide variety of formats for many different devices. For example, an open textbook can be printed, read on a screen, or heard through text-to-speech technology. The difference between OER and traditional resources is that students and educators do not have to choose between formats. With traditional materials, students often need to purchase print books and ebooks separately, and digital materials often carry an expiration date.
Here are some examples of how OER come in a variety of formats:
Open textbooks often come with supplemental materials such as homework systems, images, slides, etc., and when they do not, existing OER can provide additional support to build these materials. Instructors increasingly expect publishers to provide ancillary materials with textbooks, including lecture slides, images, videos, and homework platforms. This demand for ancillary materials is beginning to be met directly by OER publishers and commercial learning software companies who offer complementary products to open textbooks. There are also many repositories that hold openly licensed materials that can serve as ancillaries, including PowerPoint slides, videos, and simulations. Library staff can work with professors to help find these resources or share resources that other professors have already created. Teaching and learning staff on campus can also help with creating new ancillary resources.
Here are some examples of OER ancillary materials:
OER are actually updated more regularly than the printed, commercial textbooks because they do not have to go through the commercial publishing process. These resources can also be updated by individual faculty depending on the licensing. Everyone recognizes that it takes time and effort to develop high quality educational resources, and that there must be incentives and support models in place for OER to be sustainable in the long-term. Incentives take many forms. Non-monetary incentives include course release time or recognizing OER as a contribution toward tenure and promotion. Funding models include grants and up-front payments to authors to develop resources, which then become openly licensed. Commercial models are developing around important value-added services, such as professional development, curation, and customization. In fact, virtually all of the largest traditional publishing companies have launched services branded as OER.
Examples of models that support the sustainability and continuous improvement of OER include the following:
OER carry the permissions for users to freely download, edit, and share the content to better serve all students. These permissions are granted by the creator of an OER through an open license—a legal document that informs users of their right to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the work. Open licensing is a simple, legal way for authors to keep their copyright and share their work with the public under the terms and conditions they choose. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a set of standard open licenses that are used throughout the OER community. Materials licensed under CC licenses are easy to identify, clearly explain the permissions and conditions of reuse, and don’t require any additional permission to use or adapt. To add an open license to a work, an author simply needs to include a copyright statement indicating that the resources carries a CC license, and include a link to the specific license.
Here are some ways to get support using CC licenses:
Open licensing makes OER easy to freely and legally use. Learn more about copyright and open licensing.
