Open Educational Resources (OER)
Chabot College understands that the rising cost of textbooks is a significant barrier to student success. To address this, we are committed to advancing Open Educational Resources (OER) and Zero-Textbook-Cost (ZTC) initiatives. Our goal is to reduce the financial burden on students by offering free or low-cost textbook materials that are accessible from the first day of class and can be tailored to meet diverse learning needs.
What are OER and ZTC?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching, and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or have an open license copyright that permits no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, retention, redistribution, and adaptation by others. Creative Commons adaptation of the UNESCO OER definition
Zero textbook cost (ZTC) means that students do not incur any costs for purchasing textbooks for the course. Instructors can use Open Educational Resources (OER); Open Access, Creative Commons, and public domain materials; along with resources owned or licensed by the Library.
Note: Zero-cost to the students does not mean zero cost to the institution. Library collections and subscription and other paid materials could be used to make the course ZTC.
Why OER and ZTC at Chabot?
Provides free or low-cost instructional materials reducing financial burden for students and promoting equity in education.
Gives students access to course materials from the first day of class.
Saves students money. From summer 2022 to spring 2024, the estimated accumulative textbooks savings is over $6,000,000.
Promotes academic freedom by allowing instructors to revise and remix content so they can teach exactly what they want to teach and how they want to teach it.
Support for Faculty at Chabot College
Chabot College offers support for faculty looking to adopt ZTC/OER materials.
Faculty can access a wealth of resources to help find, customize, and implement affordable materials for their courses through OER and/or other ZTC resources.
We offer stipends for projects and professional development opportunites through mentorship and various training workshops.
Join the Fall 2025 OER/ZTC Faculty Cohort
Call for proposals to join the Fall 2025 OER/ZTC Faculty Cohort. Projects can receive a stipend of $500-$2,000.
Open to all full-time and part-time instructors. Priority will be given to project proposals submitted by Friday, September 5, 2025 at 5:00 pm.
New to OER? Then, choose Option A.
Did you complete Option A and have a project in mind? Then, it is time for Option B!
Option A: Complete the OER and Equity Basics Self-Paced Canvas Course
Option B: OER Re-mix, Curation, and Creation
OER Basics: learn about equity in OER, open licensing, open pedagogy, accessibility, curation of resources, and research about how OER affects student success.
- Complete the OER and Equity Basics self-paced online course
- Pass the course module quizzes and final assessment
- Estimated number of hours: 8 hours of online, asynchronous work in Canvas
- $500 one-time stipend upon completion of course
Choose between a Small OER Project or Medium/Large OER Project (described below).
B1: Small OER Project - Revise/Re-mix
- Complete the Canvas Mastering LibreTexts self-paced online course
- Revise or re-mix existing OER materials for use in making your class ZTC
- Estimated number of hours: 16 hours
- $1,000 one-time stipend
B2: Medium-Large OER Project - Author
- Complete the Canvas Mastering LibreTexts self-paced online course
- Author new OER instructional content and/or ancillary materials such as homework to make the course fully ZTC
- Estimated number of hours: 32 hours
- $2,000 one-time stipend
If you have any questions:
- stop by our office hours
- read our FAQ document
Looking for Support?
Fall 2025 OER/ZTC Office hours
Contact your Division Mentors:
See Chabot's Hall of OER/ZTC Heroes who have made their courses zero or low textbook-cost.
Looking for OERs?
Chabot OER/ZTC
ASCCC OERI
OpenStax
OpenStax is the word's largest puractive learning technologies and education research for high school and college.
It is a nonprofit initiative of Rblisher of open educational resources (OERI) and a provider of inteice University.
LibreTexts
Other OER Repositories
OER Collections
OER Courses
- Chabot Library ZTC Collection: The lists will be updated regularly. As of fall 2025, there are 33 discipline collections. Please contact John Chan (jchan@chabotcollege.edu) if you have any questions.
- LibreTexts Chabot Commons: There are currently 30 OERs created/remixed by Chabot faculty.
- LibreTexts: LibreTexts is a non-profit organization and a platform for creating, customizing, and disseminating open educational resources (OER), primarily focusing on textbooks. It aims to provide free and accessible learning materials, especially textbooks, to reduce the cost and increase availability for students.
- ADAPT: ADAPT is a comprehensive online assessment and homework infrastructure that provides faculty the ability to include auto-graded and non-auto-graded activities from different platforms such as H5P, MyOpenMath, WeBWork, and its own native ADAPT questions.
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AMSER: Materials in the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository are free for use and adaptation. Most resources are at the high school and community college levels.
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OpenStax: This resource allows instructors to pull from a range of learning objects and organize the material to create their own courses. It offers textbooks, journal articles, learning objects, and assignments. Once organized, the material can be viewed as either a PDF or EPUBS document for distribution to students.
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COOL4Ed: Part of the California MERLOT program, it has a great index of Open Source course materials, including reviews by UC, CSU and CCC faculty.
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Khan Academy: This resource offers open educational resources primarily in mathematics and science but has expanded to include other subject areas. These 3,000 plus online videos are self paced and allow students to focus on the specific lessons they need help with.
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Merlot: This massive resource offers access to learning objects, full course curricula, open access journals, assessment tools, open textbooks, discipline-specific pedagogical resources, and more. Material is peer reviewed, and reviewer and user comments are accessible to all.
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OASIS: Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 75 different sources and contains 176,005 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
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OER Commons: Searchable open access repository of educational resources including full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes; interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics; adaptations of existing open work; and electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
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OpenOregon: Browse or search the table to find out what Oregon community college instructors are using to reduce textbook costs in their courses. If you see a name and email address, feel free to contact that person about their class.
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Open Washington: Open Educational Resources (OER) network. This website has a comprehensive list of resources, information, and all the tools needed to adopt, remix, or author your own OER.
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Phet Interactive Simulations is a project at the University of Colorado Boulder. PhET's mission is "To advance science and math literacy and education worldwide through free interactive simulations."
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Smithsonian Open Access where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo."
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BCcampus: has a curated collection of open textbooks that align with the 40 highest enrolled post-secondary subject areas in British Columbia.
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College Open Textbooks: A collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving awareness, adoptions, and affordability of open textbooks.
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Community College Consortium: is an Open textbook collection more focused on Community College level materials, although many of them do contain those as well.
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LibreTexts: Is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning.
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OpenStaxCollege: Great source of peer-reviewed textbooks. Tend to lean more toward the sciences. Usually have additional resources such as ppt slide shows and tests to go along with textbook.
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Open Textbook Library: This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.
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Open TextBook Store: calls itself a “Store,” but they are not a publisher. It provides freely and openly available math textbooks created by Washington CTC faculty.
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Academic Earth: Find lectures and videos from some of the most respected instructors in the world.
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Boundless: provides a number of open course packages (47 course packages in Biology alone) in 22 discipline areas.
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Bridge to Success: Materials, mostly study skills, to support students transitioning to college.
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JHSPH Open Courseware: offers open materials and images from more than a hundred courses developed by the faculty of John Hopkins University.
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LearningSpace from Open University: All of the learning materials presented on this site are CC licensed, but don't confuse "Learning Spaces" with the full Open University- their licensing/copyrights are different.
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Lumen Learning: Use Lumen’s OER course materials to improve affordability, access, and student success. Lumen provides a simple, well-supported path for faculty to teach with open educational resources inside your LMS.
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MIT OpenCourseWare: Offers approximately 2,000 courses in a range of disciplines, which include lecture notes, online textbook material, assignments and exams with answers, and multimedia. The course content is downloadable, with the exception of the video materials, through iTunes.
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MITx: These MIT course are open to everyone and include recorded lectures, course material, and assessments.
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OCW Utah: Open education course materials aimed at a high school level.
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Open Courseware: An independent search engine that indexes open education classes from places like MIT, Yale and UMass.
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Open Course Library: WA Open Course Library project offers 81 of Washington's most enrolled courses. There are a lot of great readings in these course files. Great community college content
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Open Yale Courses: provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
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Saylor.org: Saylor offers full courses online. It can be really helpful to use the reading lists from Saylor to find and organize your courses.
Additional Resources
- Past OER/ZTC Chabot Workshops
- Academic Senate Meeting Minutes 9/20/20
- Academic Senate OER Resolution passed on 9/24/21
- Student Senate Meeting Minutes passed $10,000 OER funding 3/29/21
- See how ZTC and LTC help students save
- See all the ways students can save on textbooks
CONTACT US
- Cristina Moon
OER/ZTC Coordinator and Spanish Faculty - John Chan
OER/ZTC Library Coordinator - Caren Parrish
OER/ZTC Faculty Lead and French Faculty