BILL ANALYSIS Ó
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair
SB 1052 (Steinberg) - California Open Education Resources
Council
Amended: As Introduced Policy Vote: Education 7-1
Urgency: No Mandate: See staff comments
Hearing Date: May 24, 2012 Consultant: Jacqueline
Wong-Hernandez
SUSPENSE FILE. AS PROPOSED TO BE AMENDED.
Bill Summary: SB 1052 establishes the 9-member California Open
Education Resources Council (COERC), which will be responsible
for a variety of tasks geared toward reducing textbook costs for
the 50 most widely taken lower division courses.
Fiscal Impact: Substantial one-time costs for COERC activities.
Significant on-going costs to maintain and update digital files.
COERC: The scope of the Council costs will depend on the
degree to which the workload can be absorbed by existing
staff to the Intersegmental Committee of Academic Senates.
At a minimum, there will be significant costs to staff the
Council, to complete the required activities, to create and
execute the competitive bid process, to create contracts
with the entities that ultimately produce the content, and
to establish procedures for segment use of the final
products.
Digital textbooks: The state will pay for the
creation/procurement of 50 high-quality, open source,
digital textbooks. The specific costs will be driven by the
market for the 50 courses for which textbooks will be
sought. These digital files will be (as is detailed in
companion bill SB 1053) stored and administered on an
ongoing basis.
Revenue loss: Upon implementation, there will likely be a
significant loss of state sales tax revenues, to the extent
that students were previously purchasing textbooks for the
50 courses from sales tax-generating businesses in
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California. Additionally, there will likely be a substantial
revenue loss to campus bookstores, which are often
self-supporting and, in some cases, support other campus
activities.
Background: This bill attempts to ameliorate the high costs
college students in California's public postsecondary
institutions pay for textbooks. It seeks to diminish the
financial burden on students by requiring textbooks for the 50
most common lower division courses to be available on reserve at
the campus library and by enabling instructional materials for
those courses to be available through Open Education Resources
(OER).
OERs are educational materials such as textbooks, research
articles, videos, assessments, or simulations that are either
licensed under an open copyright license or are in the public
domain. OERs provide no-cost access and permission to revise,
reuse, remix, or redistribute the materials.
Proposed Law: This bill establishes the COERC, and specifies the
Council's composition and activities. Membership will include: 3
faculty selected by the academic senate of the University of
California (UC) , 3 faculty selected by the academic senate of
the California State University (CSU), and 3 faculty selected by
the academic senate of the California Community Colleges (CCC).
This bill requires the COERC to:
1)Develop a list of the 50 most widely taken lower division
courses in the public postsecondary education segments.
2)Create and administer a standardized, rigorous review and
approval process for open source materials developed
pursuant to this legislation.
3)Promote strategies for the production, access, and use of open
source materials.
4)Require publishers of these textbooks to, as a condition of
the purchase of textbooks, to provide the campus with at
least 3 copies of the textbook at no cost, for placement on
reserve at the campus library.
5) Establish a competitive bid process in which interested
parties may apply for funds to produce 50 high-quality
affordable, digital open source textbooks and related
materials in 2013.
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This bill also specifies requirements for the
textbooks/materials themselves.
Related Legislation:
SB 1053 (Steinberg), which would establish the California
Digital Open Source Library, to be jointly administered by the
UC, CSU, and the CCC for the purpose of housing the OERs, is a
companion bill to this measure.
SB 48 (Alquist) Chapter 161/2009 requires any individual firm,
partnership, or corporation that offers textbooks for sale at
the UC, CSU, the CCC, or a private postsecondary education
institution in California, to the extent practicable, make them
available for sale in electronic format by January 1, 2020.
Staff Comments: The costs of this bill will be primarily driven
by the decisions and activities of the newly-created COERC. The
Council is required to make a number of decisions and complete a
variety of tasks that will require substantial professional
support. It is not clear that the COERC membership identified in
the bill would have the ability to execute the tasks required
without considerable outside expertise and administrative
support, and the bill does not specify who has the authority to
provide that needed assistance, nor how it will be funded.
The bill, as written, provides that 9 faculty members, none of
whom is described as being the "chair" or convener of the
Council, will make numerous decisions that would be impractical
to have completed by these faculty without some level of
support. For example, the bill requires the COERC to "create and
administer a standardized, rigorous review and approval process
for open source materials developed pursuant to this
legislation", and to "promote strategies for the production,
access, and use of open source materials." Typically, a council
with extensive duties would have a support staff to create
agendas and prepare materials, and at least one full-time
outside consultant to lead the project and complete the work
agreed upon by the council members.
This bill further requires the COERC to establish a competitive
bid process in which interested parties may apply for funds to
produce 50 high-quality affordable, digital open source
textbooks and related materials, to verify that those materials
meet the specifications of the bill, and to ultimately decide on
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the materials that the state will purchase. It is likely that
attorneys will be needed to write and negotiate the contracts
with the individuals or organizations creating the digital
textbooks. It is unclear who will have the authority to
determine the terms of those contracts, or the responsibility
for payments. Additionally, subject matter experts will be
needed to help determine which digital textbooks should be
purchased across the 50 courses, as this will be a substantial
investment in resources that will be used across the segments.
Moreover, this bill places additional requirements on the CCCs,
in terms of both COERC work and implementing the new OER
practice, the extent of which will be determined by the COERC.
These requirements may constitute reimbursable mandates on the
CCCs.
The exact cost of commissioning the digital textbooks cannot be
known, but will be substantial. The bill specifies that the
Council will commission OERs, specifically; in addition to the
large scale of work, the producers are selling the state their
rights to their own intellectual property. While individual
students likely stand to save considerable money on their own
textbook expenses, the bill does not indicate where the funding
will come from for the state to purchase the digital textbooks
that will be used by all of those individual students.
Proposed Author Amendments: The proposed amendments would place
the COERC under the administration of the existing
Intersegmental Committee of Academic Senates. The amendments
also make the bill operative only if funds are appropriated in
the Budget Act, or if federal or private funds are made
available, or any combination thereof.