ZTC stands for Zero Textbook Costs and when a class is designated as ZTC it means that students will pay no additional fees for learning materials for this course. However, ZTC does not mean all learning materials in the course are open or free. Examples: ebooks or streaming videos the college library has purchased that are available through library databases to currently enrolled students.

OER stands for Open Educational Resources. These are openly licensed (most often through Creative Commons) and are free meaning anyone can access them for free online. They are available to edit, remix, rework, etc. All OER are ZTC.

The goal of CRCs OER Conversion Grant is to create ZTC courses using OER for all primary texts and homework. There might be some cases in which the college purchases commercial material that will never be OER (e.g. a recently published novel, seminal work in a discipline, etc.). This grant is designed to compensate faculty for the work it will take to update their courses to move away from commercial-based learning materials that must be purchased by the student. Examples of these might include: textbooks published by academic publishers (e.g. Pearson, Cengage, etc.), commercial-based homework systems (e.g. MyLab Math), workbooks, etc.

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources Initiative has done a great webinar on this topic: Clearing Up Confusion: OER, ZTC, and Fair Use (recorded on 3/12/2021).