Legislation is in the California Senate committee aiming to create
a digital library for California public colleges. It would create an online
resource housing open source educational resources. Open source materials are
published under open licenses and can therefore be distributed
online at minimal cost.
These resources would be based on the findings of a California
Open Education Resources Council, a council that would determine the 50 most
widely taken lower division courses and then approve the open source materials
created for those classes. Though the bill did not state how the council would
go about determining which classes to include, and though the focus of classes
differs from university to university, the library is still a positive effort
to provide low-cost materials to all California public
institutions.
This legislation, if moved out of committee and passed, would
allow educational materials to be more widely disseminated throughout the
California public education system. More importantly it would ease the
financial strain on students who pay hundreds of dollars every semester for college books.
The council hopes to answer concerns about the quality of open source
textbooks. In addition, switching to open source materials may be a hassle for
some professors but this digital open source library will help relieve one of
the biggest economic stresses students face.
Beyond simply deciding which courses to
provide open source texts for, the council would create a system allowing publishers
and faculty members to apply for funds to create these digital textbooks and
other educational materials for the library to disseminate. By having faculty
members from the universities work directly in the formulation of these textbooks,
the high quality of materials used in university classes would be better
maintained. Professors should still be compensated for their work, but with the
new library system, students will not have to pay the premium price that they
currently do.These textbook saving tips brought to you by Cheap-Textbooks.com
