TechEDge | California Community Colleges

New Center Supports Open Education Resources

Last Updated on Tuesday, 23 February 2010 Written by Judy Baker, Ph.D Monday, 22 February 2010

Faculty at California Community Colleges (CCC) now have a centralized source of information about how to use open textbooks to lower educational costs for their students.

The newly established Open Educational Resources (OER) Center for California provides faculty with convenient ways to find, use and share high-quality instructional materials.

The CCC Board of Governors established the center as a statewide pilot program “to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers” on their campuses. The pilot program is authorized by Assembly Bill 2261, which was signed into law in fall 2008.

“The OER Center for California is committed to aiding educators in the state’s 112 community colleges in finding, using and developing the best and most affordable open learning materials to meet the needs of their students,” said Judy Baker, director of the center and dean of distance and mediated learning at Foothill College, located in Silicon Valley’s Los Altos Hills.

Foothill College is managing the center under an agreement with the CCC Chancellor’s Office. The center pilot started this January and runs through 2012.

The center will provide a structure by which community college faculty and staff in California can locate, scrutinize and customize open educational resources for creating high-quality, free course materials and textbooks for California community college students. These digital learning materials are openly licensed or available in the public domain so that they can be used, shared or customized for classroom and laboratory use.

In addition to affordability, other benefits of OER include the ability to rapidly and regularly update learning content and the convenience of digital delivery.

De Anza College student, Maya Kostyuanovsky, is one of thousands of community college students who’ve experienced the benefits of using open educational resources.

The OER Center for California pilot may make paper textbooks a thing of the past.

When asked about her experience using an open textbook for her statistics class at De Anza last year, Kostyuanovsky said, “I definitely would use more, if they were available. It worked really well for me. It was easy to hop online and do what I needed. There was nothing I couldn’t do. And it was great to be able to print what I needed and not have to drag along the whole heavy book.”

The OER Center for California has partnered with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) and the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative (CCOTC) to maximize the use of available open learning resources. The CCCOER is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, educational nonprofits and other education-related organizations whose goal is to identify, organize and support the production and use of high quality, accessible and culturally relevant open textbooks for community college students.

The CCOTC is a two-year CCCOER project, funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which facilitates educator use and reuse of open textbooks to best suit the instructional needs of community colleges students. To accomplish this, the CCOTC provides training for instructors adopting open resources, an online professional network and community, support for authors opening their resources and other services. Among the resources provided by the CCOTC are peer reviews of open textbooks and links to more than 400 open textbooks that may be suitable for community college use.<>

Judy Baker, Ph.D is the Dean of Distance and Media Learning at Foothill College
and the Director of the Open Educational Resources Center for California.