In 2013, California legislators passed legislation to help college and university students increase their access to and save money on books. The California State University (CSU), the University of California (UC) and California Community Colleges system (CCC) were directed to establish the California Open Education Resources Council and CSU was legislated to establish the California Digital Open Source Library.

The California Open Education Resources Council (COERC) is a collaborative initiative between three large post-secondary institutions: CCC, CSU, and UC, with three faculty members from each system collaboratively recommending strategies for:

Identifying at least 50 high enrolment courses shared across the three systems with which to align a selection of free and open e-textbooks for adoption;
Developing a quality assurance process for the collection of free and open e-textbooks;
Conducting needs assessments and outreach for adopting the e-textbooks; and
Developing professional development resources to support faculty adopting the e-textbooks.

This article discusses the benefits, challenges and potential of implementing OER for this consortium.

More articles can be found at Contact North/Contact Nord: https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/open-education-resources-oer-applications-around-world/taxonomy-term

Keywords

OER benefits · OER repository · open textbooks