22 Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Rajiv Jhangiani
British Columbia (Canada)
Type of Institution: Public university
Impetus: Transparency and promotion of zero textbook cost (ZTC) courses
Student Information System: Banner (Ellucian)
Markings Used: ZTC (attribute); “This course section has ZERO TEXTBOOK COSTS.”
Unique Features: Professional marketing materials, multiple ZTC programs (Z-Degrees)
Background
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) is a public post-secondary institution in British Columbia with a student population of approximately 20,000. We are Canada’s leading institutional adopter of open educational resources (OER), and we now also actively support the adaptation and creation of open textbooks through OER grants and OPUS, our Open Publishing Suite. In November 2017, KPU launched Canada’s first Zed Cred program (sometimes referred to as a Z-Degree in the United States) wherein the Zed refers to zero required textbook costs and Cred refers to a credential. Relying on a pragmatic combination of courses that assign OER, library resources, or instructor-created materials, and courses that require no resources at all, students were able to earn the Certificate in Arts credential without spending one dollar on textbooks. We selected the Certificate of Arts because of its flexibility, which offered students a lot of choice when selecting courses (only 2 out of the 10 are prescribed) and provided a faster path to KPU offering a Zed Cred.
Although the Spring 2018 semester was the first for the Zed Cred, students were still unable to easily identify Zed Cred courses at the time of registration. The promotional mechanism we used at the time involved publishing a webpage that listed all of the Zed Cred sections. This strategy was never intended to serve as a long-term solution, not least because few students were aware of the existence of the page. Fortunately, our registrar’s office was willing and able to add the following note below each of the section listings in the course timetable (schedule): “This course section has ZERO TEXTBOOK COSTS and is part of the Zed Cred program. For information about programs that you can complete with zero required textbook costs, visit ZedCred” (see fig. 22.1). However, students who were unaware of the existence of the Zed Cred webpage would have had no way of searching for course sections that had zero required textbook costs, a state of affairs that led us to investigate how we might integrate a course marking convention.
Step 1: Research
As the institutional lead for our open education initiatives, I was aware that other institutions had managed to find ways to integrate open and affordable materials designations in their course schedules. I was also aware that the director of institutional relations at OpenStax had created a survey (Finkbeiner n.d.) and spreadsheet (Finkbeiner 2019) to facilitate the collection and sharing of this knowledge and had invited representatives of institutions that had adopte