Partnership aims to offer free e-textbooks
By The Bakersfield Californian
Central Valley community colleges will begin working on a system to give students access to free digital textbooks developed by faculty, officials announced Thursday.
The announcement was made by Kern Community College District officials and Dean Florez, former state senator and assemblyman who now is president of the 20 Million Minds Foundation. That nonprofit, aimed at providing affordable textbooks, will manage the system.
The groups will join in a partnership with Rice University in Houston that will open free online course material for educators to use, modify and share. Those e-textbooks will be much cheaper than their print counterparts now, or possibly free. Community college students can spend more than $1,000 for textbooks in a school year.
"If students can get textbooks for free, that's a win for everyone," Florez told media on his Central Valley tour to promote the effort. He will be heading next to Washington, D.C.
Florez's foundation will work with the Central California Community Colleges Committed to Change Consortium, or C6 Consortium -- an 11-campus group that includes Bakersfield College and Taft College. The C6 consortium in September was awarded $20 million in federal grant money to train 3,000 students in jobs in healthcare, agriculture and clean energy fields. The C6 group was the sole group in California to get a piece of the larger $500 million federal grant.
Rice University will provide its Connexions system, which maintains an online repository of more than 20,000 free lessons accessed by more than one million people per month, according to Rice. Florez's foundation will manage the assignment with the local community colleges.
The ultimate goal of the project is to improve retention and graduation rates of students in our valley community colleges.
"We have an opportunity here to look outside of the box ... to help out students complete their goals," said Corny Rodriguez, a BC political science professor and president of the BC Academic Senate, a governing group of faculty leaders.
Tech companies and state and federal officials have been pushing to place digital textbooks in the hands of students everywhere.
Currently, e-textbook offerings at BC are minimal. Of the 50,600 new textbooks students sold there since May, 103 were digital textbooks -- or .1 percent of all books. Cal State Bakersfield's digital textbook sales too make up less than 1 percent of all textbook sales.
To read more about the digital textbook push, including local movement, go to www.BakersfieldCalifornian.com.
-- Jorge Barrientos, Calfornian staff
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