Progress Reports

CA-OER Council Progress Reports

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Released in April 2016, over two years of the Council’s work and findings are embodied in the following White Paper titled, OER Adoption Study: Using Open Educational Resources in the College Classroom

Released in the April-June 2016 issue of Open Praxis, an article written by Council members, Larry Hanley and Diego Bonilla: Atolls, Islands, and Archipelagos: The California OER Counciland the New Landscape for Open Education in California

Since the signing of AB 798 (Bonilla, 2015), the California OER Council has shifted its focus to support CCC and CSU proposals for AB 798 funding.

The goal of College Textbook Affordability Act of 2015 (AB 798) is to save college students money by empowering professors and local campuses to adopt high quality, free and open educational resources for course materials. Assemblywoman Bonilla (sponsor of AB 798) recognized that free and open educational resources can reduce the total cost of education for students and their families in California’s higher education institutions.

This Request for Proposals (RFP) provides the guidelines, requirements and processes for campuses to submit proposals for their local textbook affordability programs and receive up to $50,000 to implement their program and report on the student savings created by their program.

The CA OER Council has been instrumental in identifying 50 courses common to the 3 California higher education systems, identified many free and open etextbooks that faculty could use as course materials for these courses, implemented a rigorous faculty review process for evaluating the quality of the free and open etextbooks, and engaged in a variety of research and policy development to support the adoption of free and open textbooks in California higher education. (See the Council’s progress reports.)

Progress Reports

This project concluded in May 2016. See COOL4Ed for information about the subsequent project, AB 798 (Bonilla).