About this guide
This guide is for faculty and course designers interested in reducing textbook costs for their students using Open Educational Resources (OER), library-paid resources, or other free online materials.
Also included here are tips, tricks, best practices, and informational videos and links to tried-and-true resources that support your journey from investigation to implementation of OER materials in your course.
For additional information, please see our OER - Open Educational Resource page.
What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?
According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Open Educational Resources are defined as:
Teaching learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course material, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://hewlett.org/open-educational-resources-breaking-the-lockbox-on-education/
Open Educational Resources (OER) are open-licensed, educational materials that are freely available for use, sharing, and modification. The term OER (Open Educational Resources) was first defined by UNESCO in 2002 as “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license” and can “range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.” This means that OER can include textbooks, teaching materials (like presentation slides), assignments, tests, quiz banks, videos, course shells, and other materials used in education.
These resources are usually online and free to access, although there may be a cost for printing the materials that can be found online or in your course's Canvas shell.
What is ZTC?
ZTC stands for Zero Textbook Cost. Instructors use OERs to make their courses ZTC. You can freely use and reuse ZTC learning materials. The materials were authored or created by an individual or organization that chose to retrain few, if any, ownership rights to the materials.
You can download the resource and share it with cololeagues and students. For other materials, you may download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work.
What is the difference between Open Educational Resources (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)?
Open Education Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license, such as a Creative Commons license, that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and may include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students (Hewlett).
OER Materials may include:
- Textbooks
- Course readings, articles, and journals
- Course packs
- Quizzes
- Streaming videos
- Virtually any other material used for educational purposes
OER are one of the many Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) mechanisms for providing high quality course materials to students at no-cost.
Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)
S.B. 1359 states Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) course materials are legally, digitally available and “may include open educational resources, institutionally licensed campus library materials that all students enrolled in the course have access to use, and other properly licensed and adopted materials.”
Zero textbook cost (ZTC) also means that students do not incur any costs by purchasing course materials. Zero-cost to the students does not guarantee zero-cost to the institution, i.e. subscription databases, library equipment loans. To create a ZTC course, instructors might use Open Educational Resources (OER); Open Access, Creative Commons, and public domain materials, along with teacher-created materials and electronic resources owned or licensed by the Taft College Library.