During Spring 2017, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) established the ASCCC Open Educational Resources Task Force. Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials freely available in the public domain. A definition of OER from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is: "OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others."
The ASCCC will be formally launching its OER Initiative (OERI) in the spring 2019 term. The ASCCC OERI received funding via a trailer bill during the last budget cycle and proposed that the ASCCC would create an initiative that serves to:
● coordinate OER activities in the CCCs, including content curation, review, modification, and development;
● engage in ancillary resource curation and development; and
● provide support to address copyright, accessibility, technical, and other related issues (e.g., print on demand).
In an effort to prioritize the OER work, there is a need to determine what OER is currently in use in our system and what the perceived needs are. In order to approach this in a manageable way, we are piloting information collection from select disciplines. It is our goal to gather as much general and specific information from faculty in the identified disciplines as possible. At the present time, we are gathering information from faculty teaching courses in the following disciplines:
1. Child Development (Early Childhood Education)
2. Communication Studies
3. Computer Science
4. Cybersecurity/IT
5. English
6. Math
7. Psychology
8. Sociology