Getting Textbooks to Zero Student Cost: ZTC and OER

"Intellectual Curiosity and the Role of Libraries" explores how first and second year college students develop intellectual curiosity through library experiences. Such experiences can shape one's undergraduate career, and include interactions with library spaces, instruction, relationships, services, and outreach. This collection of works was carefully curated to provide unique, meaningful, and personal narratives from librarians related to the first/second year college student experience.

Our hope is that this guide to citing personal experience and interviews meets our goal of supporting students to produce their own knowledge, as well as honoring the academic value of their lived experience and the experiences of their families and communities. Through the use of a set of guidelines we created for students to cite personal experience and interviews, we found students self-reported increase in engagement and success in academic assignments. We propose this set of guidelines are an important practical tool for critical, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy, as well as a method for teaching ethical research.

This handbook guides students through concepts, content, and exercises that help them develop media literacy by understanding media and power. The authors want students to not only gain the ability to critically analyze the languages and discourses – textual, visual, audio, and code – that people use to create and interpret media content, but also to understand the overarching context: media possess immense power in contemporary societies around the world.

Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred. Originally created by University of Arizona Information scholar Diana Daly, this 2024 "living book" edition of Humans R Social Media welcomes additional authors and features contributions by students to help readers understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media shapes our world in turn.

Engaging graphics, compelling examples, and easy-to-understand explanations make Choosing and Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research, your most valuable, open access resource for completing research-based writing assignments and projects.

This textbook has supplementary Canvas modules available for import/download in the Canvas Commons (if the link doesn’t work, search for the title of the textbook or search for ASCCC OERI).

"There are several good books out there but the least expensive costs a few lunches or a couple months’ trolley budget. The need seemed obvious for an Information Literacy OER for our students, so we wrote one....The overarching approach: keep it at the community college level, keep it short, stick with the basics assuming the content would be supplemented by the depth of the class work and assignments, write it as the class is taught in that it would cover transferable skills and not be San Diego City College specific, write it as a text book in that it does not follow my class schedule, but makes sense as a book, do not use a single theme or research question for all the examples in the book, but rather use a variety in hopes that variety would hold interest and/or in hope at least one might resonate with each student, create a title that says what it is and would be easily found by librarians as opposed to some creative title such as 'It isn’t Rocket Science: what you need to know about research.'"