Campus leadership and campus-based Affordable Learning Solutions programs are essential to provide faculty, staff, students, and administrators ways to support, find, and use high quality and affordable course materials. The CSU Office of the Chancellor has been working with campuses to develop the own AL$ programs and the “showcase” below illustrates how each campus is advancing their local AL$ program in ways that are aligned with their campus’ culture, priorities, and capabilities. See a list of AL$ campus coordinators.
Soaring textbook costs are negatively impacting today's college students – especially those from historically underserved populations. In recent years, California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) has emerged as a national leader in textbook affordability by introducing the first three zero-textbook-cost undergraduate majors (aka, "Z-Majors") in the entire CSU system – and perhaps the entire nation. The California Alliance for Open Education (CAopenEd) was established to help scale CSUCI’s unprecedented success to a larger, external audience by equipping campus leaders with the administrative training, guidance, and resources they need to help reduce course material costs and increase student success.
The CSU has signed a limited agreement with Pressbooks. We would like to support any CSU faculty or staff member who is interested in publishing course materials in the open education environment.
Universities across California, especially in the 23-campus California State University system, have become more transparent about textbooks and more proactive in assigning free, digital or low-cost books to students.
CSU's MERLOT is featured as the "mothership of OER" in Campus Technology. "This one ought to be called the OER Mothership, since you couldn't do much better than to begin your OER content search here...."
