Textbook Affordability and Open Educational Resources (OER)

This Topic Guide is intended for faculty interested in learning more about Textbook Affordability, which includes Open Educational Resources (OER) and LCT-designated courses as well as other efforts around the college. Information presented here includes textbook affordability initiatives in the state of Oregon, links to adoptable OER, and a bit about the philosophy behind open education.

This guide will help you:

• Learn more about OER and why lowering costs for students is important
• Learn about OER efforts at CCC and in Oregon
• Find answers to OER FAQ (from Open Oregon)
• Discover open source resources in popular OER repositories to use in your class
• Learn about Low-Cost Text (LCT) courses at CCC 
• Learn about Creative Commons and open licensing
• Brush up on copyright and fair use in educational settings

Clackamas Community College (CCC) is a student-centered organization dedicated to providing equitable, innovative, and responsive education to the community it serves. In service of this mission, CCC has developed a Textbook Affordability Plan.

Textbook affordability offers opportunities to fulfill our College mission. In 2019, Oregon passed Oregon House Bill 2213, which lays out requirements for this plan. A Textbook Affordability Workgroup was formed to develop the plan, which was completed in June 2021. If you are interested in joining the workgroup to further develop this plan or work on other TA initiatives at CCC, please contact the library: reference@clackamas.edu.

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.