Textbook affordability refers to initiatives that remove barriers for students by providing affordable and free course materials. Textbook affordability includes Open Educational Resources (OER), low-cost texts (LCT), and many more strategies to remove financial barriers for students.
Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open (Creative Commons) license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and reshare them. OER can include:
- Learning content: full courses, course material, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
- Tools: software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
- Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.
The above bullet points are from UMass Amherst Libraries - a great place to learn even more about OER.
Low-Cost Text
At CCC, low-cost text (LCT) courses have a required course material cost of $40 or less. LCT appears as a designation in the CCC course schedule next to course sections that meet the LCT course material cost requirement.
Included in the cost calculations are: required textbooks and other text-based materials, workbooks, lab manuals, online homework software (e.g. MyMathLab, etc.), and codes or publisher-provided curricular materials for students. Printing costs are not included, unless a printed version is required for the course.
Excluded from the cost calculations are: art supplies, calculators, software, course and student fees or equipment, and optional costs.