ZTC Initiative — CHEM V101
Purpose
Ventura College's Zero Textbook Cost and ZEN initiatives exist to remove financial barriers to learning. Within that framework I converted CHEM V101, lecture and lab, as part of the Pre-Allied Health Pathway Acceleration Grant. The course serves pre-nursing and allied-health students. General chemistry textbooks commonly list above $250 when bundled with a lab manual, and a national survey has found that most college students have skipped buying a required text because of cost. Converting the course addressed that directly, and it also rebuilt how students reach and move through the chemistry materials.
Before the conversion
CHEM V101 was already close to zero cost before the ZEN program, though I had not measured it against the formal criteria. Lectures ran on slides I wrote, homework on worksheets I wrote, and the lab manual was a free PDF students could work in digitally, print themselves, or open on the lab computers, with printed copies available on request.
The syllabus still listed a commercial text, because that is what the course's official materials list said, and in class I told students not to buy it and pointed them to a free online one instead. So the course was already free in practice while the paperwork still said otherwise, and a student reading the syllabus before the first day had no way to know that.
The course lacked the structure that makes a free course usable: materials in the order they are needed, a lecture and a lab that point at each other, and a license that lets anyone else take the work.
The conversion
Canvas rebuilt as weekly modules. The course had been a flat archive of files. It became weekly units, each carrying its readings, slides, guided worksheets, quizzes, and recorded lectures with searchable transcripts, so a student meets materials in the order the week uses them.
Lecture and lab aligned. The two halves were brought into the same sequence, so what a week covers in lecture is what that week's lab does.
Textbook adoption made formal. The free text I had been pointing students to became the course's listed one (LibreTexts for CHEM V101, OpenStax for CHEM V120B), so the course's zero-cost status rests on an adoption on the record rather than on what I say in the room.
Lab manual revised alongside the lecture materials, for less printing and better use on a screen. That document has since gone through a failed release, a rollback, and a full re-authoring, described on the CHEM V101 Lab Manual Renewal Project page.
Paid homework tools examined. I started looking for a free platform that could replace them, which is work that continued past this project and is written up under Tools I Tried.
Collaboration ran throughout, with the ZEN team, the Life Sciences department, and the Distance Education Advisory Group, to keep ADA compliance, copyright safety, and Canvas integration consistent across STEM courses.
Scope and results
The ZEN committee selected the course for conversion on Pathway One (original content curation and creation), the larger of the two tracks offered that term. It ran as a district special project from January 27 to May 2, 2025, sized at 81–120 hours, with completion verified that May. All materials are freely available to students and openly licensed where applicable.
What the work left behind is the course's weekly-module structure, which the shared CHEM V101 Canvas shell has used since Fall 2025 (see Linked Lecture–Lab Coordination). The conversion also fed the college's ZTC Acceleration Grant data reporting, documenting Chemistry's readiness within the Pre-Allied Health pathway.
ZTC-OER Brain Trust
In September 2026 I was selected for the college's Fall 2026 ZTC-OER Brain Trust, which runs through December 1. Within it I lead the redesign of the Brain Trust's own Canvas course, and on October 15 I sent Ame Maloney a proposal for that redesign.
Next steps
The CHEM V101 lab manual is distributed at no cost to students and carries no open license, which keeps the section as a whole below an OER designation. In Fall 2026 I applied for a ZEN stipend to close that, and on October 10 the project was selected on Pathway B: the revised manual is to be shared through Canvas Commons under a Creative Commons license so that others can take and adapt it. I signed the stipend agreement on October 15, and the work is due December 1, 2026.