Prof. Andrew Parker and Prof. Marianna Bonanome of City Tech and Prof. Annie Han of BMCC are co-Pi’s of the Title V Opening Gateways DOE Collaborative Grant. Prof. Peggy Dean and Prof. Oleg Muzician (BMCC) are also part of the Opening Gateway grant leadership team.
In Fall 2019, with the end of the Opening Gateways Title V grant looming, City Tech took the initiative to reach out to other WeBWorK-using CUNY campuses. Information was gathered on WeBWorK administration, faculty professional development, student/faculty usage, administrative support, growth and future plans. This information was shared with campus participants and discussed at meetings with representatives from City Tech, BMCC, BCC, City College, LaGuardia CC, Queensborough CC, Baruch and CSI. It was determined that, rather than moving forward separately, a cross-campus collaborative effort for WeBWorK content creation/alignment should be established along with centralized training and professional development.
In order to focus these efforts, more detailed information was gathered regarding OER textbooks/WeBWorK problem set pairings. Partners willing to align WeBWorK content to specific OER texts in current use by multiple CUNY campuses were identified. A proposal requesting CUNY OER (Open Educational Resource) funding was submitted in December of 2019 in support of this project. These funds are supporting partners from City College, LaGuardia CC, Queensborough CC, BMCC, BCC and Queens College in the authoring, alignment and sharing of WeBWorK content aligned with Openstax texts. This content will be shared back to the community via WeBWorK’s Open Problem Library (OPL) and through CUNY channels.
Moving forward, it is the hope that more campuses will be onboarded as partners, widening the adoption of existing content and accelerating the creation of new content. Our ultimate goal is to build a robust WeBWorK community at CUNY with faculty working collaboratively in support of student learning while reducing financial barriers. The potential impact of a fruitful collaboration between campuses is huge as there are currently 250,000 students in the CUNY system, many of which are enrolled in degree programs with math requirements.
