About This Book

This text was chosen because it offers materials supporting students’ success in higher education that are openly-licensed. Openly licensed materials give readers and authors full “5R” benefits in their use: to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. Each individual page in this text includes at the bottom specific licensing and attribution notices for works included on that page.

Some of primary material for this text is part of a collection originally named Success in College from a publisher that focuses on college textbooks. From their beginning until the end of 2012, they licensed all of their books under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, allowing anyone who so desired to copy them, give them away, or modify them, as long as they acknowledged the authors, released the copies under the same license, and didn’t do so for commercial gain. This was an unusual model, but they hoped it would work. (They sold access to additional study materials, as well as copies of books that would fit well on e-readers.)

In late 2012, they decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn’t working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. (Initially, these fees were rather inexpensive compared to normal textbook prices, but still not free.)

Because the books were still available under a Creative Commons license at the end of 2012, they were downloaded to http://2012books.lardbucket.org/ and then repackaged so that they are available outside of the publisher’s website and can be used by anyone under the terms of that original Creative Commons license.

Contributions from Monroe Community College

Two faculty members at MCC, Terry Shamblin and Renee Dimino, have contributed extensive curation, revision and adaptation of all openly-licensed works included in this text, as well as the creation of new works. In keeping with open-licensing practices, their revision and adaptation of open works with open “ShareAlike” licenses are offered under those same licenses. New works created by Terry Shamblin and Renee Dimino are provided under a Creative Commons BY: Attribution license.

This first MCC-specific version was created for the express use of the College Success Program during the 2015-2016 academic year.  Revisions made during Spring 2016 include the addition of a glossary, some adjustments to content such as the different types of degrees, and minor copy editing changes.  This second edition is intended to be used during the 2016-2017 academic year.