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Colleges following what the company calls the Textbook Zero model would offer a section using open-education alternatives for every required course and elective needed to earn the degree. Lumen is now testing the model with an unnamed community college on the East Coast, and is also looking for colleges interested in applying the model to general-studies and computer-science degrees.

Partnering with Lumen Learning, a Portland, Ore.-based company that helps educational institutions integrate open educational resources into their curricula, TCC plans to offer a textbook-free associate of science degree in business administration based on Lumen's Textbook Zero model. For students who pursue the new "textbook-free" degree, the total cost for required textbooks will be zero. Instead, the program will use high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources, known as OER, which are freely accessible, openly licensed materials useful for teaching, learning, assessment and research. It is estimated that a TCC student who completes the degree through the textbook-free initiative might save one-third on the cost of college.

""The implementation of an OER strategy is really difficult, and the assessment of an OER strategy is really difficult," he says. Lumen has helped to advance both. "That's unique," he says. "That's what they've contributed.""

The Utah Open Textbook Initiative (UTOT) began in 2010. From a small pilot involving less than 10 teachers and three grades, UTOT has grown to a statewide program for grades 7 - 12 that improves science learning and drastically reduces the cost of providing every student with access to quality science curriculum. This whitepaper describes the UTOT process for successfully creating and adopting open science textbooks.

"Open educational resources rate as one popular strategy, with 92 percent of faculty members and 97 percent of administrators saying instructors should assign more of them. Still, past research has suggested many faculty members haven't heard of OER or don't know where to discover open content. David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, said the report builds on previous findings about OER."