History and Background
The initial formation of the Zero Textbook Cost Program (ZTC), Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Pedagogy movement here at College of Marin started in the late Fall of 2016. Namely, the Project Director, Susan Rahman; Administrative Support, Dawn Lucier; Access and Assistive Technology Specialist, Elle Dimopoulos as well as the efforts of a number of key faculty members including Dayna Quick and Nancy Willet were all instrumental in the creation of the ZTC workgroup.
Current Efforts
Faculty members and students are encouraged to participate in the mission of College of Marin by fostering open scholarship both locally and globally.
As a public institution, we are entrusted by the community to serve, support and promote effective change through education. In service to this mission, our charge is twofold: to provide a platform for access to equitable and open educational materials leading to additional pathways to Zero Textbook Cost degrees and more broadly, to ensure that any instructional material, courses or research generated by competitive grants are accessible to all.
What we're doing to support student success here at COM
College of Marin is actively supporting the adoption of Open Education Resources with the creation of Zero Textbook Cost degree pathways for students to effectively meet its obligations pursuant to bill SB1359. In summary, it states:
Existing law urges textbook publishers to take specified actions aimed at reducing the amounts that students pay for textbooks, including providing to faculty and departments considering textbook orders a list of all the different products the publisher sells. Existing law requires the Trustees of the California State University and the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges, and requests the Regents of the University of California, to take specified actions with their respective academic senates, college and university bookstores, and faculty to promote the selection of textbooks that will result in cost savings to students.
This bill would require each campus of the California Community Colleges and the California State University, and would request each campus of the University of California, to identify in the online version of the campus course schedule its courses that exclusively use digital course materials, as specified, and communicate to students that the course materials for these courses are free of charge and therefore not required to be purchased. By imposing new duties on community college districts, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program. The bill would become operative on January 1, 2018.