Recognized as an OER/ZTC Faculty & Institutional Resource Ecosystem
From the nominator:
In 2021, Cosumnes River College articulated an ambitious goal to become a Zero Textbook Cost college. It began with 162 course sections. Today, 75% of all scheduled sections, more than 1,100 each semester, are ZTC, saving students $3 million per semester and $23.8 million since the program began. Behind that growth are two interconnected open resources built by OER Coordinator Andi Adkins Pogue: a faculty resource site that has reached 13,000 active users and been viewed 111,000 times since 2022, and an institutional toolkit, live since October 2025, already attracting nearly 1,000 active users and 7,900 views. Together, they demonstrate that practitioner-built, freely shared infrastructure can drive open education adoption at scale.
What stands out most is that a model developed locally is made public across its whole process, not just its results: the workflows, the evidence base, the coordination strategies. It is licensed CC BY without further restrictions, it addresses coordinators and administrators, and it keeps the barrier to entry as low as it can be. This is what sharing infrastructure rather than only content looks like. This project truly is, as stated in the nomination, a model for “fostering a global culture of openness.
Award Reviewer
Learn More
- Zero Textbook Costs at Cosumnes River College
- CRC’s OER/ZTC Toolkit for California Community Colleges
