Sponsored by:
Senator SANDRA B. CUNNINGHAM
District 31 (Hudson)
Senator NILSA CRUZ-PEREZ
District 5 (Camden and Gloucester)
Co-Sponsored by:
Senator Ruiz
SYNOPSIS
Requires institutions of higher education to develop open textbooks available to students at no charge.
CURRENT VERSION OF TEXT
As introduced.
An Act concerning college textbooks and supplementing chapter 3B of Title 18A of the New Jersey Statutes.
Be It Enacted by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:
1. As used in this act:
“Open educational resource” means an educational resource that is licensed under an open license and made freely available online to the public.
“Open license” means a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable copyright license granting the public permission to access, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, adapt, distribute, and otherwise use the work and adaptations of the work for any purpose, conditioned only on the requirement that attribution be given to authors as designated.
“Open textbook” means an open educational resource or set of open educational resources that either is a textbook or can be used in place of a textbook for a postsecondary course at an institution of higher education.
2. a. Within 180 days of the effective date of P.L. , c. (C. ) (pending before the Legislature as this bill), a four-year public or independent institution of higher education, after consultation with faculty members at the institution, shall submit a plan to the Secretary of Higher Education to expand the use of open textbooks in order to achieve savings for students enrolled in the institution.
b. The secretary shall review the plan submitted by an institution to ensure that the plan has the potential to:
(1) achieve the highest level of savings for students through the sustainable expanded use of open textbooks in courses offered by the institution;
(2) produce the highest quality open textbooks that can be most easily utilized and adapted by faculty members at the institution, and correspond to the highest enrollment courses at the institution;
(3) ensure that the full and complete digital content of each open textbook created or adapted in accordance with the plan is made available free-of-charge to students enrolled in the institution:
(a) on the institution’s college bookstore website in an easily accessible location; and
(b) in a machine readable, digital format that a student can download; and
(4) ensure that open textbooks are available to students by July 1, 2020.
3. This act shall take
effect immediately.
STATEMENT
This bill provides that within 180 days of the bill’s effective date, each four-year public and independent institution of higher education, after consultation with faculty members, must submit a plan to the Secretary of Higher Education to expand the use of open textbooks in order to achieve savings for students enrolled in the institution. An open textbook is an educational resource that is licensed under an open license and made freely available online to the public.
Under the bill, the secretary will review the plan to ensure that the plan has the potential to: 1) achieve the highest level of savings for students through the expanded use of open textbooks in courses offered by the institution; 2) produce the highest quality open textbooks that can be easily utilized and adapted by faculty members; 3) ensure that the full and complete digital content of each open textbook is made available free-of-charge to students enrolled in the institution; and 4) ensure that open textbooks are available to students by July 1, 2020.
This bill implements a recommendation of the College Affordability Study Commission included in its September 2016 final report.