Report 2007-116 Recommendation 19 Responses
Report 2007-116: Affordability of College Textbooks: Textbook Prices Have Risen Significantly in the Last Four Years, but Some Strategies May Help to Control These Costs for Students (Release Date: August 2008)
Recommendation #19 To: University, California State
To ensure that courses taught by faculty whose main instructional materials are open educational resources meet the articulation requirements for students who transfer to the UC and CSU systems, faculty and the system offices at the UC, CSU, and community colleges should collaborate to develop acceptable standards and policies related to content, currency, and quality of these alternative instructional materials.
Annual Follow-Up Agency Response From December 2009
The CSU has a long history of active and extensive collaboration with the California Community Colleges and the University of California in developing resources, guidelines, and tools to facilitate the transfer of general education courses across institutions.
Faculty and staff from CSU and the California Community Colleges serve on the CSU Chancellor's General Education Advisory Committee, now in its 18th year, to continuously develop the "Guiding Notes for General Education Course Reviewers". These Guiding Notes are available on-line, are widely read by community college faculty and staff in their proposals for courses that would be acceptable for transfer to the CSU.
The following text will be adopted within the Guiding Notes document in January 2010.
"Proposed courses should include a textbook. Reviewers use the representative text as a way to confirm their understanding of course content. It's understood that the instructor in a given section may choose a different text, but the proposed one is still given close attention. It's expected that the structure of the text will be consistent with the course outline.
"Texts don't need to be published in hard copy. The UC and CSU welcome the use of on-line texts and other Open Educational Resources, so long as the resource is a stable, bona fide textbook, and not just a collection of links to lecture notes or other web pages."
This strategy for "open educational resource" (OER) material emerged in fall 2008 at a meeting of the southern group of the California Intersegmental Articulation Council (CIAC). Community college articulation officers and UC representatives were in attendance. This approach was further explained in spring 2009 at presentations with community colleges. There has been agreement within the higher education community (faculty and articulation officers) that a policy statement that welcomes OER material, rather than trying to define it will result in greater use of such OER. (See 2009-041, p. 51)
California State Auditor's Assessment of Annual Follow-Up Status: Fully Implemented
All Recommendations in 2007-116
Agency responses received after June 2013 are posted verbatim.