Cincinnati State Technical and Community College’s Affordable Learning Initiatives

Awareness/Advocacy

• Members of the college community attended the Affordable Learning Summit in Akron and the Textbook Affordability & Inclusive Access Immersion event to learn about state-supported initiatives and projects being launched at other Ohio community colleges.
• On campus, affordable learning options and open resources were presented to faculty during a Common Hour and as part of divisional and administrative group meetings in alignment with other college efforts and the ODHE to reduce student costs.

Adoption/Creation Support

• The campus library offers an OER Guide focused on locating, evaluating and adopting course materials available at no cost to students. These materials may be open resources or licensed materials from the library’s collection.
• Faculty can seek individualized guidance from a librarian to locate open options from repositories such as OpenStax, OER Commons and OhioLINK’s A-Z Resource List. Faculty can preview texts, ancillary materials and read peer reviews to facilitate materials choices which align with Program Learning Outcomes. 
• Faculty are encouraged to use a variety of options to enhance affordability, including open resources and licensed full-text articles, streaming videos and e-books from the library’s collection which are available to all students in both face-to-face and online classes.

Other Affordability Initiatives

• Early Childhood Education classes now use the ‘inclusive access’ model where all e-textbooks from a partner publisher are included as a flat fee in the cost of the class. This fee represents significant savings over print editions. 
• During AY18-19, all ENG 101 and 102 classes (55 sections) utilized an open textbook representing a savings of $165,000 for students. Open resources were also adopted for Addiction Studies 200 (2 sections), French 101 and 102 (6 sections) and Physics 151/152 & 201/202 (24 sections).
• The following courses used licensed e-books from the library’s collection at zero cost for students for AY18-19:  Network Communications 121/122 and 240 (total, 10 sections) 
• Library Reserves: 300 textbooks and other items representing 197 courses can be used on-site and free of charge to complete readings and homework assignments.
• Custom edition texts are used in multiple courses, providing significant savings over the cost of the original, larger text. Textbooks are often used for sequential courses, negating the need for additional purchases across semesters.