The purpose of the AB 798 College Textbook Affordability Act is to increase awareness and adoption of OER materials by community college faculty across the disciplines. This goal is accomplished by supporting faculty to educate themselves about available OER in their disciplines, empower faculty to investigate appropriate textbooks and other materials for their courses, and remix/adapt OER when needed. The mini-grant program at BCC will support faculty to educate themselves and find high quality OER in order to increase the adoption of OER at BCC. In addition to the funds that faculty receive, they would also receive support from BCC librarians in finding and identifying OER in their discipline and for their courses, consultation on integrating those sources into Canvas (and making print copies available where necessary), and support to ensure their section is marked as “zero textbook cost" in the online class search if that is the result of their efforts. Faculty can apply for mini-grants individually or with others in their department. The goal is to increase OER adoption across our college by fifty class sections within the next academic year.
All librarians have been trained in searching for and identifying OER using a variety of methods, including searching OER repositories, identifying OER through OER publishers, querying OER list-servs, contacting OER discipline leaders and subject experts and finding sources in the public domain when necessary. Grant leads, Jenny Yap and Heather Dodge, have created numerous handouts, a library guide, and training materials to help support faculty in their search. Grant leads also track adoptions through a spreadsheet that calculates overall cost savings when OER materials are adopted. This spreadsheet is shared with leaders at the CSU and CCC system to measure the overall impact OER makes for California’s higher education students.
OER directly supports and aligns with several BCC initiatives already at work. Guided Pathways seeks to move students clearly and directly through career and transfer pathways with as few impediments as possible. Textbook costs, which generate a considerable financial burden and stress for students, prove to be a veritable impediment. If a student had a guided pathway that promoted course sections that had no textbook costs associated with them it would increase their chance of completing those courses. Distance Education is also in a moment of importance at BCC. With the pandemic throwing all classes online, many students are left without the campus network, reserve loans from the library, and other ways of borrowing and finding textbooks for their classes. OER course sections would have online textbook materials available on their first day, at no additional cost to the student. OER texts are currently used in several learning communities' classes, across multiple disciplines, and in nearly every major at BCC.
5. OER Author (100 hours $5000) 
The deadline for applications for this round are on December 14, 2020. Applicants will be notified of their status by December 18. After December 18th, applications will be accepted on a rolling basis based upon available funds.
