BILL ANALYSIS �
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair
SB 1053 (Steinberg) - California Digital Open Source Library.
Amended: April 19, 2012 Policy Vote: Education 7-0
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 1053 establishes the California Open Source
Digital Library (COSDL) for the purpose of housing open source
materials.
Fiscal Impact:
Start-up costs likely in the low millions of dollars;
on-going costs of $400,000 to CSU. Exact costs will be
determined by the choices made by the California Open
Education Resources Council, which is given the authority to
oversee the COSDL.
Potentially substantial (on-going) reimbursable mandate on
the California Community Colleges (CCCs); the system's
participation is required, and CCCs are eligible to seek
reimbursement for state-mandated activities.
Background: This bill, in conjunction with SB 1052 (Steinberg),
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.
The segments currently administer various digital collections,
but none of the type envisioned in this bill. The University of
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California (UC) administers the California Digital Library which
provides access to a digitized worldwide collection of research,
books, journals, government publications and maps, allows
faculty to publish articles and communicate with other scholars,
but does not include textbooks and materials that are placed by
faculty on reserve at the campus bookstore. The California State
University (CSU) administers the Affordable Learning Solutions,
which is a web-based system that houses Multimedia Educational
Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), the Digital
Marketplace and other tools that enable faculty and students to
search for free or low-cost materials and faculty to be
recognized for work as well as communicate with other scholars.
Current law authorizes the California Community Colleges to
establish a pilot program to provide faculty with the
information, methods and instructional materials to establish
open education resources centers, but the program was stalled
due to budget constraints.
Proposed Law: This bill establishes the COSDL for the purpose of
housing open source materials developed by the California Open
Education Resources Council (COERC), as specified. It also
requires that COSDL to be jointly administered by the CSU and
CCC, (and requests that UC to also administer it), and that all
material to bear a creative commons attribution license.
Related Legislation: SB 1052 (Steinberg), which is currently on
this Committee's Suspense File, is a companion bill which
establishes the 9-member COERC which will be responsible for a
variety of tasks geared toward reducing textbook costs for the
50 most widely taken lower division courses.
Staff Comments: This bill requires CSU and the CCC, and requests
the UC, to jointly establish and administer a new digital open
source library that will house 50 lower division textbooks,
determined by the COERC. This will incur substantial costs to
CSU, as well as to the UC, if it chooses to participate.
The UC has estimated that the bill would require, at a minimum,
a modular textbook building/editing system, and a hosting
infrastructure. The UC opines the cost to be approximately
$900,000 to $1 million a year to create and maintain such a
system. The exact costs would be determined by the functionality
and system decisions made by COERC. It is unclear how costs
would be shared among the segments. In addition to the system
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costs, each of the segments is likely to incur additional
administrative costs to implement procedures for system
operation and use by its students, as well as continued
coordination with the other administrators.
This bill requires the CCC to be a joint administrator. All CCC
activities needed to implement the provisions of this bill, as
well as any share of cost for the system, would likely be
reimbursable to the CCCs as a new state mandate. This would be a
direct cost to the General Fund.
Proposed Author Amendments: The proposed amendments would
specify that the COSDL shall be administered by the CSU, in
coordination with the CCC and the UC (if the UC Regents take
action to approve the activity). 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.