It’s about to get a lot easier for instructors at community colleges to start using free digital textbooks in their courses. And once they do, the rest of the nation will  follow – eventually.

This week, the Open Educational Resources Center for California went online. The web site will act as a clearinghouse for community college faculty interested in free digital textbooks but  unsure how to use them. They’ll find links to the 450 or so texts now available,  and soon they’ll see peer reviews of many of the titles. The course materials and textbooks are openly licensed or available in the public domain.

Foothill College, in the Silicon Valley community of Los Altos, is sponsoring the site, though it’s largely the product of the as-yet unfunded labor of Judy Baker, dean of distance and mediated learning at Foothill and a leader in the open source textbook movement. The Legislature passed a bill in 2008 establishing the center but didn’t fund it.

Foothill also was the force behind the establishment of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, a California initiative funded by the Hewlett Foundation to develop and promote free online course materials.

The immediate beneficiaries of free online texts are students, who often find themselves paying more for materials for their courses than in course fees. A printed version of free digital text may cost about $20, compared with upward of $100 for some texts.

But beside cost savings, free digital texts offer instructors the opportunity to collaborate with one another on updating,  revising and customizing the content – by adding links to other sources, videos and new material. It has a huge potential to improve learning.

Baker says the Resources Center should provide a better idea of who’s using free digital texts and at what colleges. At nearby De Anza College, four courses – in math, business  and statistics – are employing them. The latter is using “Collaborative Statistics,” written by Foothill math professors Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean. It  became the first free digital text after a foundation bought the copyright from the authors.

Foothill has been actively pushing open digital texts since 2004, when community college district trustee Hal Plotkin persuaded his board and then-Chancellor Martha Kanter to lead the movement for the community college system. Kanter is now Obama’s under secretary  of the Department of Education for higher education, and Plotkin has joined her as a senior policy adviser.

Soon their ideas may be writ large. President Obama has proposed $500 million in competitive grants for developing new open online courses as part of his American Graduation Initiative to substantially increase graduation rates at community colleges over the next decade. The bill is now before Congress .