San Diego Mesa College
IN-41: Textbook Affordability

San Diego Mesa College has a robust Course Reserve, which is essentially a textbook lending program. Information is available here https://www.sdmesa.edu/library/services/course-reserves.shtml. Course reserves are print and electronic books held by the SD Mesa library. Currently, there are 1690 items held on reserve at Mesa. The library acquires these materials through faculty loaning the library a copy, HEERF funds, Pay It Forward program (students donate books at the end of a semester they no longer need). Print items typically check out to students for 2 hours. Students can then use a high-speed scanner to digitally scan and email needed chapters to themselves. Mesa library also offers scanning to students after they complete a request form and a digital scan of up to 20% of a text is emailed to a student.
Each semester the Mesa Bookstore provides the library with a list of textbooks required for courses. When supplemental funds are available (CARES Act, HEERF, Mesa College Foundation) and titles are available electronically through approved library vendors titles are acquired. This has helped with all levels of Japanese and many novels needed for English literature courses.

An OER (Open Education Resources) plan for Mesa was created in 2018 to provide the opportunity for faculty to explore, implement, or adopt OER in a supported professional learning environment. Faculty received ESU stipends in the amount of .25 ESU for completion of the program and creating a comparison of an OER text versus the current text used for the course. The second phase, MOSAIC (Mesa’s Open Shared Accessible Inclusive Courses) launched with a pilot in Spring 2020 with teams of faculty completing revising a course to use no-cost materials. MOSAIC is 10 weeks of asynchronous professional learning covering open educational resources, licensing, backward design, accessibility, humanizing, and assessment with a focus on equity throughout the program. When complete, the courses will be available in the Canvas Commons shared space for use by SDMC faculty. Five cohorts have completed MOSAIC with 32 faculty revising 17 courses to become zero cost. Faculty who complete the 10-week professional learning and create an open course receive a stipend of 1 ESU. Each semester these courses are taught students save nearly $50,000. Savings generalizing based on 35 students per class and the current textbook value recognized of $79.37 by OpenStax.
San Diego Mesa College has an ASCCC OERI Liaison, each month a series of webinars are provided to highlight no-cost and open educational resources for each discipline. Flex credit is offered to faculty for participation. The ASCCC OER also has a statewide call for proposals to develop OER for high-enrollment courses in which groups of faculty collaborate statewide to develop resources. SD Mesa College faculty have participated and received funding for writing OER.