To end a good day, we watched the OpenEd 2021 session entitled “The Impact of Zero-Cost Materials Designations: A State School’s Course Marking Legislation” presented by Adriana Poo and Christa Bailey, Senior Assistant Librarians at San Jose State University and Louis Tran, ALS Student Ambassador at San Jose State University. They spoke about affordable learning solutions (ALS) and the importance of highlighting these programs and making course markings discoverable by students. Thus, course marking registration makes zero-cost materials courses accessible. California was the second state to have course marking registration after Oregon in 2015. A spring 2019 deadline for all 23 California State University campuses and 19 California Community Colleges was implemented for marking zero cost, no cost, and low-cost icons in course catalogs. Affordable Learning Student Ambassadors inform with flyers and video tutorials, facilitate workshops (in-person and on Zoom), and spread the word through social media. Tran shared tutorials they created for a workshop and the student perspective. Tran mentioned that often students didn’t know about the course markings. Reporting course savings was part of the responsibilities of Poo and Bailey. When they began to analyze the data of the SB 1359 legislation, they identified benefits such as finding zero-cost pathways and recognizing faculty and student ambassadors. They analyzed data at San Jose State University since 2018 to identify the type of courses that were zero-cost. However, they also couldn’t trust the data because some courses that were listed in the catalog did not have the icon while there are ebooks available at no cost to students. Their hypothesis was the bookstores’ adoption process was the issue. After a meeting with stakeholders including campus IT and bookstore representatives, improvements were made to the adoption process. However, now they realized a low-cost option could also benefit the bookstores. I thought it was interesting that the way faculty report and adopt textbooks could complicate the course marking legislation. Bailey and Poo spoke about expanding their efforts to consider what other campuses are doing and the challenges of implementing course marking legislation. I had never considered how complicated the reporting of low-cost and zero-cost courses could be! While adding a logo to designate low-cost and zero-cost courses makes sense, the way those classifications are made could be very difficult. I wonder what we could do on our campus and how challenging it would be to implement?
