About

The California Community Colleges Board of Governors established the Open Educational Resources Center for California 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 authored by California Assemblyman Ira Ruskin (D-Los Altos) and signed into law in fall 2008.

The Open Educational Resources Center for California is committed to aiding educators in the state's community colleges in finding, using and developing the best and most affordable open learning materials to meet the needs of their students.

Foothill College is managing the Center under an agreement with California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. The OER Center for CA started this January.

"Foothill College was selected to establish the Open Educational Resources Center because it has already done groundbreaking work in this area and is in the best position to make this a success for California," said California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, Ph.D.

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.

 

Goals

  • Establish an Advisory Group comprised of representatives from colleges and organizations committed to promoting OER in community colleges.
  • Identify sources of adequate grant funding to accomplish the pilot project.
  • Design and implement a model for campus OER centers that promote and support the development and use of OER that is student-centered, meaningful, pedagogically sound and fully accessible by all students
  • Design and implement a model for campus OER centers that promote and support the development and use of OER instructional materials.
  • Develop a community college professional development course that introduces faculty, staff, and college course developers to the concept, content, creation, and production methodologies that enable OER to be offered to students in community college classes
  • Create an OER information repository to serve as the single point of contact for information about community college OER, including working in the public domain, OER courses and course materials, research and production processes, and professional resources for creating and repurposing OER.
  • Develop a reporting system (survey) by which participating districts can report to the Chancellor’s Office of the California Community Colleges, upon request, on all of the following: (a) The number of courses in the system that use OER; (b) the number of faculty who develop OER for other faculty in the system to use in their classes; (c) the number students who use OER in their courses; (d) The quality of faculty and student experiences with OER compared to traditional courses; (e) The grades earned in OER courses; (f) The cost of OER course materials compared to non-OER materials.

Benefits

 

The advantages of using and developing open educational resources include:

  • lower educational costs for students
  • iterative and rapid feedback loop
  • professional recognition
  • online medium allows for rich media
  • modifiability
  • adaptability to learning styles
  • currency