Author: Cailean Cooney

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Call for Applicants to the OER Fellowship, AY 26-27

The application period is now open and will close at 11:59 pm on Friday, May 15th.

We’re offering two info sessions via zoom on Friday, April 17th and May 1st; both from 2-3 pm.

Overview

The Library seeks applicants for the 2026-27 Open Educational Resources (OER) Fellowship, which brings together faculty across the college working in a community of practice model as each participant develops a course-specific OER. Launched in 2015, this funded program runs in conjunction with the CUNY-wide OER initiative managed at the system-level by our partners at CUNY Central’s Office of Library Services (OLS). The initiative “seeks to incentivize and empower faculty to support their students by reducing the cost of their course materials to zero and creating, adapting, and adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP).”

We invite proposals from faculty new to or returning to the City Tech OER Fellowship. Proposals that incorporate active learning methods, take a student-centered approach, and address underrepresented and multidisciplinary subject areas are encouraged.

Before Applying

Types of OER projects that are well-suited to the OER Fellowship Program:

  • Zero-cost OER for a course that previously required a paid textbook (this may include first-time experimental pilots to assign OER in place of paid course materials).
  • Zero-cost OER for a course with a recommended text that does not require paid materials.
  • Zero-cost ancillary/supplemental OER (e.g., study guides, review modules, lessons, discussion questions, class activities, lecture outlines, and/or writing assignments).

Faculty interested in potential authorship of OER involving multiple authors/collaborators, or interested in proposing a project that would span beyond one academic year to complete, should contact Cailean Cooney to explore whether the College’s OER Team can support your project.

Similarly, faculty interested in substantive revision and extension of OER that have previously received funding should contact Cailean Cooney prior to submitting an application.

Eligibility 

  1. Full-time faculty that coordinate or regularly teach at least one section of a course, and have consulted with course/discipline coordinator AND department chair about the proposed OER project.
  2. Part-time faculty on 1-3 year re-appointments, with the approval of course/discipline coordinator AND department chair to move forward with the proposed OER project.

Fellowship Participation and Requirements

  1. Active participation in an intentional community of practice with college peers: mandatory participation in 7 synchronous meetings held on Fridays from 10 AM – 12 PM during the academic year via zoom (3 in fall; 4 in spring).
  2. Active participation in asynchronous discussion and activities conducted on the Fellowship cohort’s OpenLab site.
  3. Learning materials created with funding from this project must be assigned a Creative Commons license (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA). This includes materials authored from scratch, adaptations of CC licensed materials, and curated compilations. Fellows are also eligible to include existing materials that are public domain, library digital resources, or freely available to link to without violating copyright.
  4. Accessibility: Materials adopted, adapted, or created as a result of this grant must meet university-wide accessibility standards.
  5. Finished projects must be shared publicly via an OpenLab site or other CUNY supported public platform (Pressbooks, Manifold). If the materials are document-based, they must be submitted to CUNY’s institutional repository, CUNY Academic Works.
  6. Projects must be completed during the 2026-2027 academic year with a deadline of June 15, 2027.

Funding Information

Faculty compensation will include project work and faculty development training. Faculty will be paid for participating in 14 hours of professional development meetings (at adjunct hourly NTA rate). In addition to this, faculty stipends for OER projects may range from $1,300 – $6,000, depending on scope of work, also calculated at the non-teaching adjunct hourly rate.

Support offered by the OER Team

  • Help finding openly licensed, public domain materials, and library subscribed digital resources to use
  • Help understanding and applying Creative Commons licenses
  • Guidance regarding copyright and fair use
  • Help assembling an organized and accessible OER
  • Help transferring materials onto an open platform

Key Dates

Applicants selected for the OER Fellowship will conduct work from September 2026 through June 2027. Fellows are expected to implement the OER the next time they are scheduled to teach the course.

  • Fellowship application opens for submissions: April 14, 2026
  • Online info sessions (register in advance): April 17 & May 1, 2026 at 2-3pm
  • Fellowship application due date: May 15, 2026
  • Notice of application decisions emailed: Early June 2026
  • Fall 2026:
    • September: Fellows finalize project scope
    • Fellows complete working draft of sample educational material
    • Fellows participate in 3 synchronous Fellowship cohort meetings
    • Fellows incorporate best practices for licensing, attribution, and accessibility into their OER
    • Fellows contribute to asynchronous discussion and activities via the cohort Fellowship OpenLab site
  • Spring 2027:
    • Fellows participate in 4 synchronous Fellowship cohort meetings
    • Fellows contribute to asynchronous discussion and activities via the cohort Fellowship OpenLab site
    • Fellows produce OER and finalize platform selection
  • June 2027:
    • Fellows complete and submit OER for review by OER Team
    • Fellows address feedback from OER Team
    • Fellows payments are processed

Application Details

Apply online by Friday, May 15th, 2026. 

Examples of primary course materials created by colleagues through the OER Fellowship:

Please contact Prof. Cailean Cooney, OER Librarian ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu or Prof. Junior Tidal, Chief Librarian jtidal@citytech.cuny.edu with questions.

More information: Open Educational Resources at City Tech.

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Call for OER project proposals, AY 22-23

Dear City Tech Faculty,

Exciting news! New York State and CUNY have reinvested funds to support open educational resources (OER) at the University. Our short-term initiative, which many City Tech faculty have participated in from 2017-2022, has been re-upped with tax levy funds for this fiscal year 2022-2023. In short, we will continue to be able to fund and support faculty creation and use of OER. Research conducted at City Tech and other institutions shows a correlation between assigning zero-cost OER and positive student outcomes: higher retention and comparable or better grades.

We invite proposals from new and returning faculty (find more guidance on faculty eligibility below)!

Goals for the OER initiative at City Tech:

  • Provide students with long-term access to course learning materials (before, during, and after the course runs).
  • Support active learning and effective online instruction.
  • Help achieve curricular consistency across multiple course sections.
  • Help achieve coherence between sequential courses in programs.
  • Provide instructors with ready to use teaching resources that can assist with flexible teaching/learning modalities.

Considerations for participating in OER funded work this academic year:

  • Course selection:
    • We encourage converting courses that are gateway, high enrollment, part of a course sequence, required courses for a major or minor, pathways, etc., interdisciplinary in nature, course curriculum that is underrepresented, or inadequately represented by existing textbooks on the market.
  • Priorities for funding OER projects:
    • Priority 1: Develop zero-cost OER for a course that previously required a paid textbook (this may include first time experimental pilots to assign OER in place of paid course materials).
    • Priority 2: Develop zero-cost OER for supplemental/ancillary teaching and learning materials (e.g., study guides, review modules, lessons, discussion questions, class activities, lecture outlines, writing assignments).
    • Priority 3: Make substantive updates to already assigned zero-cost OER (must be openly licensed materials authored by the applicant or another scholar).
    • Priority 4: Develop zero-cost OER for a course with a recommended text but that does not require paid materials.
  • Faculty eligibility:
  1. Full-time faculty that coordinate or regularly teach at least one section of a course, and have consulted with course / discipline coordinator and department chair.
  2. Part-time faculty on 1-3 year re-appointments, with the approval of course / discipline coordinator and department chair.

Note: there is potential for multiple faculty to collaborate on creating a zero-cost O.E.R.

  • Faculty commitments / compensation:
    • Faculty compensation will include project work and faculty development training: faculty stipends typically range from $1,300 – $5,000 (and a minimum of $500) depending on scope of work, and calculated on the average non-teaching adjunct hourly rate.
    • Faculty professional development will be conducted online / via Zoom.
    • Project work must be completed during the 2022-2023 academic year. For reference, the latest deadline for large-scope projects is June 15, 2023.

Please fill out a project proposal application by Thursday, September 15th, 2022. If you have any questions or things you’d like to discuss, please get in touch with OER Librarian, Cailean Cooney (ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu) or Interim Chief Librarian, Anne Leonard (aleonard@citytech.cuny.edu).

Download a PDF version of this call.

To qualify as zero-cost OER, faculty can select course materials that are:

  1. Open educational resources that are Creative Commons (openly) licensed, including but not limited to open textbooks
  2. Public domain materials
  3. Freely available web resources that do not violate copyright
  4. Library-licensed digital resources, including articles and ebooks
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Some academic & research publishers remove access restrictions amidst COVID-19

We’re sharing a list of publishers and academic resources that have removed restrictions in order for the greater public to access important resources during the pandemic. Note that many of these are temporary lifts on access restrictions. We’ll keep updating the list as needed.

Update 3.25: Prof. Kim Abrams has created a research guide highlighting resources that have expanded access during the health emergency.

Presses

  • Cambridge University Press is offering free, online access to higher education textbooks and coronavirus research during the COVID-19 outbreak. Free access is available until the end of May 2020. Students in the United States will also be able to access free e-book versions of Press textbooks through VitalSource
  • Duke University Press Syllabi offers curated books and journal articles by subject
  • University of Michigan Press will make all content in the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection (UMP EBC) free-to-read for the remainder of the academic term

STEM & Coronavirus related / adjacent research

Curriculum – free, no account necessary (last time we checked!)

  • JoVE offers FREE ACCESS to extensive STEM education video library through June 15
  • Massolit Over 2,800 short curriculum relevant video lectures covering English Literature, History, Classics, Psychology, Philosophy, and Government and Politics. Free access is available until 30 April 2020 

 


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Open Educational Resources

    This academic year, the Library is offering three opportunities for faculty to participate in the OER Fellowship program. There are sessions running in the Fall and Spring terms, and an intensive version of the Fellowship will take place in June 2019. Over the course of the Fellowship, faculty are working to convert their course to zero-cost openly-licensed educational materials (OER).

    The Library is also offering several new OER focused workshops offered several with a focus strengthening the accessibility of course sites, and providing support for faculty to make tweaks and updates to their OER. A workshop about the Open Textbook Library ran in February, giving faculty the opportunity to complete a review of an open textbook in their discipline.

    Consider checking out some recent posts on the Library blog by Prof. Elvis Bakaitis about topics relating to the development of OER, concepts of “open,” digital pedagogy, and the topic of labor.

    The Labor of “Open” – This post takes a look into current conversations about OER creation, faculty workload, and the role of educational technology.

    OER in the News – A recap of news coverage of Open Educational Resources, and trends across higher education.

    Interactive Education and OER – For those interested in the intersections of pedagogy, emerging technologies, and OER, a short recap of notable projects.

    Download a summary of our OER activities in Fall 2018.

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    Apply now! Open Educational Resources (OER) Fellowship: Fall 2018


    The Library seeks applicants for the Fall 2018 Open Educational Resources (OER) Fellowship. Full-time and part-time faculty are eligible to apply with their chair’s approval.
    Participants will curate a zero-cost OER to replace the existing course material in a course to be taught next Spring. In order to be considered zero-cost OER, the course section you teach must assign freely available web resources and openly licensed materials; inclusion of library licensed digital resources is also recommended.  
    Program Information:
    Faculty accepted to the fellowship will participate in a series of 4 seminars on Fridays this fall (see dates below), complete the OER in January, and pilot the OER as the only required course material in their spring 2019 course.
    Seminars will cover:

    • An introduction to open educational resources
    • Copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licensing
    • Searching and selecting OER and zero-cost course materials
    • Creating an OpenLab site
    • Strategies to organize course materials for accessibility

    Requirements:

    • Participation in each of the following two hour professional development programs:
      • 10 a.m – 12 p.m. Friday, September 28
      • 10 a.m – 12 p.m. Friday, October 5
      • 10 a.m – 12 p.m. Friday, October 19
      • Additional Friday working session in November, TBA
    • Curate OER and post on a public OpenLab site – due no later than January 9, 2019
    • Teach with the OER in at least 1 course section in Spring 2019 semester
    • Submit a brief written assessment of the experience in May 2019
    • Submit your course outline and / or syllabus to Academic Works, CUNY’s institutional repository

    Payment:
    Faculty will be compensated at or above $1,300 for full participation in the OER Fellowship.
    Apply:
    Review program guidelines and submit your application online at https://LibGuides.citytech.cuny.edu/OER/program – due Tuesday, September 4th.*
    *Before submitting an application, please consult with your Department Chair (and a course coordinator, if applicable) for approval to 1) develop an OER for the course you propose; 2) teach with the OER in Spring 2019.

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    Scaling up with OER at City Tech

     
    Let’s take a look at some recent activity surrounding OER (Open Educational Resources) here at City Tech.
    CityTech is participating in the $4 million CUNY-wide OER Grant funded by New York State – we received the second highest award across CUNY! This program supports faculty in building their own OER-based curriculum: over this academic year, 24 courses are being converted to OER on a variety of topics – Africana Folklore, General Biology Lecture and Labs, Macro/Microeconomics, and more. Faculty participating in the initiative represent 15 departments across all three schools. We anticipate at least 7,000 students will be impacted by this move to zero-cost course materials. That’s nearly half of the CityTech’s FTE enrollment – now able to continue their studies without worrying about textbook costs for these classes.
    The grant has provided us with the resources to continue the Library’s OER Fellowship program – now running in both the Spring and Fall terms – funding faculty to create custom OER courses. We’re also providing funding incentives for part-time and full-time faculty to adopt existing zero-cost course / OER materials vetted and in use across the country. We’ve also amplified our programming around best practices for universal design: check out this quick guide to accessibility on the OpenLab by our instructional design specialist, Bree Zuckerman, and this introductory usability module by Prof. Junior Tidal.
    Browse the list of OER courses created through the Fellowship program and view OERs contributed by City Tech faculty in Academic Works, our institutional repository. To learn more about zero-cost course materials available in your discipline, check out the OER Resource Guide. And if you’re interested in creating a new OER, check out the OER Fellowship website.
    Want to get involved? Reach out to Prof. Cailean Cooney, OER Librarian at ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu.
    –Profs. Bakaitis & Cooney

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    Call for applicants– Spring OER Fellowships

     
    The City Tech Library is pleased to announce its call for applicants to the Spring 2018 Open Educational Resources (OER) Fellowship.
    Call for Applicants
    About the OER Fellowship:
    Approaching its fourth year, the fellowship funds faculty to curate an OER to replace a textbook as the ONLY required material in a course they teach.
    Faculty accepted for the fellowship will participate in a series of 4 seminars this coming spring (February & March), complete the OER in June, and pilot the OER as the only required course material in their fall course.
    Fellowship Requirements:
    –Active participation in faculty development seminars (Spring 2018)
    –Submit the finished OER, housed on an OpenLab site (June 2018)
    –Teach with the OER in at least 1 section and coordinate with department to expand adoption (Fall 2018)
    –Present in a faculty panel to report on classroom adoption (mid Fall 2018)
    –Submit a brief written assessment of the experience (January 2019)
    *Before applying, please review your proposal with your Department Chair for approval to 1) develop an OER for the course you propose; 2) teach with the OER next Fall 2018.
    Payment:
    Faculty will be compensated at or above $1,300 for full participation in the OER Fellowship.
    Apply:
    Review program guidelines and submit your application online at http://cityte.ch/oerfellowship – due Wednesday, November 15th, 11:59 p.m. EST.
    Questions?
    Contact Cailean Cooney, Assistant Professor / OER Librarian at ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu
    Faculty will be notified of acceptance in early December.

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    Position: Part-time Instructional Design Assistant

    The New York City College of Technology Library (https://library.citytech.cuny.edu/) is seeking an individual to work closely with the OER Librarian and a team assembled to support the College’s open education initiatives in coordination with the New York State grant to scale up OER at CUNY during academic year 2017-2018.
    Duties include:

    • Consult with grant participants on developing instructional design strategies and best practices when creating OERs for their courses
    • Support faculty to evaluate OER course content from a user-centered perspective
    • Develop online resources and tools to support instructional design with OER
    • Assist in coordination of professional development opportunities for grant participants through general education programs at City Tech including Reading Across the Disciplines (READ), Quantitative Reasoning Across the Curriculum, and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)
    • Research technologies that can be used to develop and support active learning, reading, and various literacies through OERs

    Send a CV and cover letter detailing relevant experience to: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu. Please note if you have any current employment within the CUNY system or for the Research Foundation of CUNY.
    This position is funded through June 2018.
    Flexible schedule during business hours
    14 hrs per week
    $34.62 / hour – adjunct CLT series
     

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    Position: Part-Time OER Program Assistant

    The New York City College of Technology Library is seeking an individual to work with the OER Librarian in support of the College’s open education initiatives and the New York State grant CUNY recently received to scale up OER across the university. This is a great opportunity for close engagement with an emerging trend in the profession and throughout higher education.
    Duties include:

    • Assist with administrative program support: create schedules, maintain budget records, work on program logistics
    • Collect data in support of program assessment and external reporting
    • Assist with outreach and promotion strategy across the college
    • Assist with identifying resources to support of OER creation/adoption
    • Assist with identifying resources to support student engagement with open educational resources
    • Assist with identifying discipline specific OERs
    • Follow developments and trends in open education and open educational resources

    Qualifications:

    • Excellent writing/copy editing skills and verbal communication
    • Excellent organizational, problem solving, and time management skills
    • Motivated and flexible in self-directed and collaborative environments
    • Experience with HTML, WordPress, Google Drive
    • Competency with a variety of multimodal platforms

    Additional preferred skills:

    • An interest in pedagogy and academic/school librarianship
    • Proficiency with LibGuides and Adobe Creative Suite

    Send a CV and cover letter detailing relevant experience to: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu with the subject line “OER Program Assistant.”
    This position is funded through June 2018.
    Flexible schedule during business hours
    18 hrs per week
    $28 per hour

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    ILL service 6/30-7/16

    Interlibrary loan service interruption June 30 – July 16
    If you request an ILL item between June 30 and July 16 it will wait in the queue until our ILL staff return on July 17th at which point it will be requested from another library. Apologies for the delay during this period.
    Note this will NOT affect your ability to retrieve an ILL book that was requested on or before June 29th.
    Patrons will still be notified via email when their ILL book has arrived and can pickup and return ILL books at the Circulation Desk per usual during this period.
    Thank you.