In spring 2016, CUNY Office of Library Services was selected to participate in Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree grant program. Under this grant, BMCC, Hostos Community College, and Bronx Community College, are three of the 38 colleges nationwide converting at least one section in all of the courses in a selected degree from commercial course materials to open educational resources (OER) which are delivered at no cost to students. BMCC’s Criminal Justice OER degree will be complete in fall 2018.
Unlike other BMCC OER programs which use both OER and other freely-available, no-cost materials to achieve zero textbook cost (ZTC), the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Program requires that all course materials be true OER with Creative Commons licenses. This requirement ensures that other educators in the United States and around the globe will be able to adopt and adapt the courses our faculty create for the program, thus contributing to scalability and sustainability of OER degrees nationwide.
We are grateful for the commitment and substantial work and time invested by Criminal Justice faculty, as well as faculty across the departments, in creating BMCC’s first OER/ZTC degree.