Guest Blogs , OER Events , Open Ed Updates & News

Great news from California:
The Right Time for ZTC and OER

This summer saw great news coming from California.

$115 Million for CA ZTC Degrees

In late July, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a budget bill that included a monumental $115M allocated to create Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree pathways for students enrolled in California Community Colleges. This historic investment builds on the ZTC grant program from 2016 with the aim of removing cost barriers for students and accelerating their time to completion. College grantees estimate that the original $5M in state funding generated $42 million in savings across the 23 colleges that received implementation grants. This is more than an 800% return on investment.

Inaugural CalOER Conference

One week later, the inaugural CalOER Conference convened with over 950 registrants. Organizing the conference was a grassroots, roll-up-our-sleeves effort, with representatives of the three systems of public higher education coming together, supported by a notable roster of sponsors

This cross-system collaboration lays the groundwork for a larger coordinated vision for all of California higher education. This is significant as California is home to the largest number of colleges and universities, as well as students, in the US.

Considering that this was the first year of the conference, I was excited to see more proposals than we could accommodate in the 2.5 day schedule, which had 54 presentations and 3 keynotes. Personally, I take it as a great sign that I didn’t know a lot of the presenters. 

CCCOER Represents at CalOER

Since CCCOER was founded in California, it’s natural that the organization was well represented. 

In the session “Creating a Culture of Open with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources,” Una Daly facilitated a conversation with Barbara Illowsky, De Anza College; Suzanne Wakim, Butte College; Walter Butler, Pasadena City College, and myself. We enjoyed telling the history of CCCOER’s founding and growth and highlighting the ways that CCCOER membership can boost your local projects, identify partnerships, and support your own career development.

A high point for me was the session “Open for Antiracism: Using Open Education to Support Antiracist Teaching.” The Open for Antiracism program, co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons, supports faculty aiming to leverage Open Education to make their teaching anti-racist. Una, Kim Grewe, and I described the genesis of the program, highlighted initial outcomes, and announced the release to Canvas Commons of the program’s core course. 

Another project with CCCOER support was featured in the session “A Brief Overview of the US Department of Education investment in Open Education in California,” with Ron Oxford, West Hills College Lemoore, and Delmar Larsen, LibreTexts/UC Davis. The session summarized the activities and impacts of the US Department of Education’s inaugural Open Textbook Pilot award to LibreTexts at UC Davis in 2018 and the CC ECHO Consortium led by West Hills College Lemoore in 2021. The latter project aims to fill the gaps in OER for high enrollment courses at Hispanic Serving Institutions. College of the Canyons is proud to be one of the partners on this project.

The session “Open Education Networks are vital to the Sustainability of OER” described the CCCOER project “Regional Leaders of Open Education Network” (RLOE), which brings together leaders from across institutional and regional boundaries to support the implementation of Open Ed initiatives. This session was led by Karen Cangialosi, RLOE/CCCOER; Kim Grewe, Northern Virginia Community College; and Deidre Tyler, Leadership Advisor RLOE.

Keynotes – Time for OER

Long-time OER hero Hal Plotkin delivered a rousing opening keynote. He got our attention with the memorable line that “the biz practices of textbook publishers combine the ethics of dishonest auto mechanics with the marketing practices of drug pushers.”

He also encouraged us to act, saying “you are the first generation of faculty leaders in the history of the world who have been given permission and resources to use the world’s most powerful technologies … to increase the quality and reach of higher education….This is the right time, you are in the right places, and you are the right people.”

the biz practices of textbook publishers combine the ethics of dishonest auto mechanics with the marketing practices of drug pushers

– Hal Plotkin

The second keynote was delivered by Lark Park, director of the California Education Learning Lab and member of the University of California Board of Regents. She traced the history of state investment in OER as a key tool of student affordability and shared that Governor Newsom views the $115M allocation for ZTCs for community colleges as a down payment on further investment in OER and student affordability. She also challenged us to envision a master plan for California higher education for the 21st century, powered by OER.

An exciting piece of news came with the closing keynote from Keith Curry, President of Compton College. He announced that Compton College had set the goal of being a fully OER college by 2035. He noted that this recommendation was based on collaborative, faculty-driven conversations and that as president, his job is to find resources to help Compton College’s faculty and staff make their ambitious vision a reality.

Coming on the heels of the state’s unprecedented $115M investment in ZTC pathways for California Community Colleges, the first CalOER Conference underscored that the time is right to decisively advance Open Education in the nation’s most populous state.

Find out More:

For more coverage of the conference, see recordings of the keynotes on the CalOER YouTube channel, the article Inaugural Conference Lays the Groundwork for OER in California, and on Twitter @Cal_OER, @LibreTexts, and #CalOER2021.

James Glapa-Grossklag
James Glapa-Grossklag

James Glapa-Grossklag is Dean, Educational Technology, Learning Resources, and Distance Learning at College of the Canyons and OER Fellow with the Michelson 20MM Foundation. He is past board president of CCCOER and Open Education Global.