Formation of the task force
In September of 2016, California’s governor approved SB1359, requiring all California Community Colleges and CSUs to notate within their online class schedules courses which exclusively use digital course materials that are free of charge (UCs were requested to do so, though not required). Also in the Fall of 2016, the Chancellor’s office for the California Community Colleges awarded Palomar College a Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) Planning grant. The purpose of the grant was to reduce textbook costs in order to reduce the financial barriers to student success. The name of Palomar College’s CALM committee is an homage to CSUSM and their Cougars Affordable Learning Materials (CALM) program.
With the Chancellor’s office ZTC planning grant, CALM was able to offer compensation to a cohort of 20 faculty to research and consider adoption of ZTC materials in their course(s). The material and information produced from this initial CALM cohort may be found here: Initial CALM Cohort.
Palomar College’s ZTC Planning grant proposal and Final Narrative reports can be viewed at their respective hyperlinks. These reports were prepared by the task force’s founders, April Cunningham and Kelly Falcone.
The CALM task force was officially formed in February 2017 (Senate minutes Feb 13, 2017).
In 2018 Palomar was accepted into the OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program, further helping Palomar College continue reducing textbook costs to students. In the Fall of 2018, CALM partnered with the Palomar College Foundation to offer faculty the opportunity to receive an Implementation Grant to convert their course to an Open Educational Resources (OER) course and offering this ZTC course in the Spring of 2019. (Implementation Grant call, Fall 2018)
Transition to a committee
The CALM task force officially transitioned into the CALM Committee in March 2019 (Senate minutes March 11, 2019).
How does everything fit together?
The following document created by CALM’s founders illustrates the relationship between ZTC, LTC, OER, and SB1359: CALM-LTC-and-ZTC-1.pdf