18 Central Virginia Community College
Juville Dario-Becker
Virginia
Type of Institution: Community college
Impetus: Zx23 grant; Achieving the Dream funding; Virginia House Bill 2380
Student Information System: Developed internally by college information technology personnel
Markings Used: OER (Type of Class); Zero and Low Cost (class attributes)
Background
Central Virginia Community College (CVCC) offers two-year associates and certificate programs, as well as career and technical education degrees. Regardless of the program, the continuing rise in textbook cost has been a major hurdle for most of our students. In Summer 2015, CVCC applied for and received the Zx23 grant from the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) Chancellor Innovation Fund and the Hewlett Foundation. The Z stands for “zero textbook costs” and 23 represents the number of community colleges in Virginia under the umbrella of the VCCS. The grant enabled us to redesign 12 courses as open educational resources (OER) courses. At CVCC an “OER course” is defined as a course that uses materials that are openly licensed, uses some additional content which is copyrighted but used with expressed permission from the copyright owners granted to the faculty on a case-by-case basis, or is taught with materials that have a total cost less than $40. One stipulation of the grant was that these OER courses be duly identified in one form or another in the course catalog and in the student information system (SIS) for the benefit of not only CVCC students but also all VCCS students. The information technology (IT) department, website committee, webmaster, academic divisions, Office of Enrollment Management, and college bookstore manager worked together to create a course schedule that is streamlined for students interested in identifying the different course attributes. IT personnel created the CVCC internal SIS coding system that allowed for the identification and marking of OER courses in the course catalog.
CVCC implemented the course marking system for OER courses in Summer 2016. There was no initial data collection on how many students were actually helped by the course markings. During the same term, the college received funding from Achieving the Dream, which extended the initial work done with the Zx23 grant. As of 2019, CVCC offered 35 OER courses. The OER course marking currently in place is now a handy tool relied upon by students and academic advisers when developing a student’s academic course plan.
The OER course listing marks the courses that utilize OER and do not require the purchase of a textbook, as well as courses that use low-cost learning materials. In short, some of the courses marked are taught strictly with OER, and other courses use both OER and low-cost materials. These distinctions are not apparent in the course catalog. All other courses list the cost of new, used, or rental textbooks. When students access a course in the online course listing, they can find informat