The cost of textbooks and other course materials remains a significant barrier to students across the country, particularly among community college students. For over a decade, California Community College (CCC) faculty and librarians have been leaders in the fight to lower these barriers and make sure every student has what they need to be successful. In 2020, the CCC system received a significant opportunity when Governor Gavin Newsom allocated $115M to the CCCs in support of the creation of Zero-Textbook-Cost Degrees (#ZTC)—a truly historic investment.

ZTCs are primarily built on open educational resources (#OER), which are course materials written and released under an open copyright license, most commonly a Creative Commons License. This medium for educational resources is transforming classrooms throughout the nation.

Recently, 12 faculty members from 11 CCCs furthered the CCC’s commitment to OER as they completed their Creative Commons (CC) Certification via a Michelson Spark Grant-funded CC Bootcamp at Skyline College. Offered in partnership with CC and the CCC’s Academic Senate’s Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI), faculty members developed an understanding of the types of open licenses available and the value each poses to educators and students as they prepare to implement California Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent historic investment in ZTC programming within the CCCs.


Interested in learning more? The following resources are available:
-Information on OER: https://20mm.org/oer/
-Details concerning the CC Certification program: https://certificates.creativecommons....
-The CCC Academic Senate OERI: https://asccc-oeri.org/about-us/
Governor Newsom’s historic investment in ZTCs: https://20mm.org/2022/07/29/students-...

This video, Bay Area Creative Commons Bootcamp, by the Michelson 20MM Foundation (2023) is licensed CC BY ND. 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.... This means you are welcome to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format as long as you provide appropriate credit to the Michelson 20MM Foundation and provide a link to the license. You may remix, transform, or build upon the material, but may not distribute the modified material. Note we do allow translations of this video to be distributed, but please contact Michelson 20MM for any additional requests.