If you have gone through the effort of designing your course to use Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)¹ materials so your students can learn without the additional burden of buying textbooks, thank you! But there are a few more steps you must take to mark your course with the ZTC attribute in CUNYFirst, and the process is definitely more annoying than it should be.

Before explaining how to ensure your course is marked correctly, let’s talk about the why: applying the ZTC Attribute correctly is extremely important. First, it helps students find the courses that are actually ZTC, as the attribute can be used as a filter in the CUNY Class Schedule. If a students is using the ZTC filter to help them search, they will not see any unmarked courses. Even though the faculty teaching those unmarked courses went through the efforts of making their courses ZTC, the courses would be invisible to students using the attribute.² Marking courses correctly as ZTC will also help identify faculty teaching with ZTC materials, to promote community and collaboration of open educators within and across departments and campuses. Finally, marking courses correctly also helps to show the impact of the open education work and funding that has been happening across CUNY since 2017. If we’d like to keep the funding coming (and we would- there are so many interesting open things to explore!), then it is important that CUNYFirst have accurate information about the number of ZTC sections taught each semester.

As I said, the process is more annoying than it should be, because the ZTC attribute in CUNYFirst (circled in pink in the screenshot above) is wholly unconnected to the “No textbooks assigned to class” box in CUNYFirst (circled in orange in the screenshot above), despite them sounding incredibly similar. To make matters worse, we as faculty can click the box, but we cannot apply the attribute- only the department chairs (or whoever is doing the scheduling) is able to do so. So we click the box, and think we’re done, but the course never gets marked with the ZTC attribute in CUNYFirst. I know this process is confusing, because despite being the Coordinator of Open Education and not using a traditionally published textbook since 2014, my own classes have been unmarked for several semesters!

There are whole books about how and why to mark courses in open education, and even variation across CUNY in how process works, so I’ll summarize the workflow at KCC here in two easy (if still infuriatingly-unnecessary-if-we-could-just-connect-the-box-to-the-attribute) steps:

1. If you’re teaching a Zero Textbook Cost class,³ then make sure your department chair knows to mark it with the ZTC attribute every semester. They can find it in the Course Attributes in CUNYFirst, in the same place they find Writing Intensive or ASAP.
2. Once your schedule shows up on CUNYFirst, double-check that your courses are correctly marked with the ZTC attribute (you can go to Class Details in your CUNYFirst Faculty Center); if they’re not, please email your chair and ask them to correct it right away.

I’ll be working to get this information out to as many faculty members and department chairs as possible, so please share it widely with your colleagues!

1. CUNY defines Zero Textbook Cost courses as OER + library resources + web resources that are freely legally accessible to students.
2. While not all students will use the attribute to search, it is fair to assume that those who are most cost-sensitive will.
3. If you’d ever like help converting or updating your class to use ZTC materials, please fill out this request form and we’ll get right back to you.