LibraryBuzz

February 25, 2019

Open Educational Resources at CUNY – 2019 Report

If you’ve been following the ongoing developments with Open Educational Resources at CUNY, you may be interested in the newly released Open Educational Resources Funds: CUNY Year One Report.

The report gives an overview of where the state funding was spent, information on individual projects at various campuses, and a few insights into institutional planning for the coming year. CityTech’s OER Librarian, Cailean Cooney, is identified in a section called OER Champions (see below).

CityTech OER Librarian featured in CUNY Year One Report

Other interesting snippets from the report include a discipline-specific breakdown of which courses have been converted to Open Educational Resources or zero-cost. Mathematics, Biology, and English are the top three, followed by Modern Languages, Astronomy, and Art. The report also notes a growing interest in Open Pedagogy, an emerging concept defined here as “where students take on the role of knowledge creators and share their work and their learning with others.”

Faculty awareness of Open Educational Resources as a whole is clearly increasing: in CUNY Academic Works, “the amount of OER published has increased by over 880 percent over the last four years.” There has also been productive cross-campus collaboration as a result of the state funding.

Finally, in a note that will interest faculty members at all levels, “OLS [Office of Library Services] is exploring ways in which faculty can be recognized for authoring, adapting, and adopting OER, particularly as it pertains to tenure and promotion.”

February 22, 2019

The Library is in your course

Using Blackboard?

Use the City Tech Library tab on your course menu to access a research guide that covers research basics and includes citation resources, multi-disciplinary databases, and more.

Add the subject specific library research guide for your course using the Add Menu Item feature in Blackboard and selecting Web Link to allow your students to access discipline specific resources with one click.

Using OpenLab?

The Library Tools widget is accessible in new OpenLab courses by default. This widget allows students to search for library sources from within your course and has a direct link to our main website and 24X7 “Ask a Librarian” chat service.

Cloned a course from a previous semester and don’t see the widget? Add it using the widget feature in your OpenLab dashboard. Just drag it into the Main Sidebar!

February 20, 2019

Spotlight on an OER

This week, we’ll take a look at a course developed through the OER Fellowship program at CityTech. Prof. Katherine Gregory’s site was intended as a supplement to the core course content, but is filled with readings on health care access, patient navigation, and other topics. Job training resources are included, contributing another layer of relevance for students. We asked Prof. Gregory a few questions, to get a sense of the process and experience in the OER Fellowship Program, which lead to the development of the site.

Would you describe the OER you created?

Through the summer Fellowship, I was able to build out a site for Health Services Administration (HSA) 3602 – Health Services Management II, a core course that fulfills one of the program’s writing requirements. Building the platform came with a few exciting rewards and caveats, and City Tech provided an excellent opportunity to develop my awareness and utilization of open-access resources and universal design.

What were some of the obstacles in creating your OER?

HSA 3602 has been book-cost free for many years, but the course has long needed more cohesive content to anchor the curriculum. Finding current open-access resources about health care administration remains challenging. The Fellowship has also made me more vigilant about course materials and properly citing those sources in the classroom.

How did it work out in practice?

The site was set up for students to access the Open Lab as an ancillary source for HSA 3602. Throughout the semester, I directed students to the landing page. This was under the auspices of finding paid internship and job opportunities at City Tech, CUNY, and around New York City. Building out these student resources has been an ongoing development as new sources become available to me. Often students have been incentivized to visit the Open Lab site specifically to explore these opportunities.

The Open Lab provided a much-needed refresher about universal design; this aspect of the training was invaluable to me. The tools available on the platform have raised my awareness about how curricular content should be delivered and made accessible to all students; and through this awareness, I have, in turn, passed on this knowledge to my students.

February 15, 2019

Privacy & Data: In the News

In an era of “big data,” various forms of surveillance and tracking are now being integrated into typically mundane aspects of the student experience. Let’s take a look at a few national trends.

“moonlit” by Māris Pehlaks is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

+ At the University of Arizona, student ID cards (CatCards) are used to swipe into buildings, purchase meals, and engage with other functions of college life. Through the university’s Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics, the data from these interactions is collected and used to provide insight on issues like freshman retention rates. Prof. Sudha Ram reflects that, “It’s really not designed to track their social interactions, but you can, because you have a timestamp and location information.”
+ Researchers from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and University of Wisconsin-Madison found “a widespread lack of transparency and inconsistent privacy and security practices,” by companies dealing in educational technology (EdTech).
+ The 2018 State of EdTech Privacy Report similarly found a wide range of practices by companies in the field. One consistent theme was non-transparency – the practice of limiting or concealing the use of user data, and obfuscating the full range of use within Terms of Service or other contractual agreements.
Conversations around educational privacy rights are evolving by the day, and are worth keeping a close eye on, whether as a faculty member, student, or college employee.

February 7, 2019

OER in the News

Open Educational Resources (OER) are in the news lately. Here are a few relevant highlights:
An article in InsideHigherEd notes that there is “undeniable growth” in faculty awareness of the OER. A recent report from Babson Survey Research Group found that almost 50% of 4,000 surveyed faculty had heard about OER in some depth. Co-author Jeff Seaman expressed his surprise at the shifting landscape – “I had not expected the change in print versus digital…I expected it to go [more] slowly.”
In an interview for EdSurge, Jess Mitchell notes the potential of “critical digital pedagogy” as a conceptual framework for incorporating OER into the classroom. According to Mitchell, questions of “how the materials are presented—the format that they’re in, what kind of mode they’re in,” can be used to guide student understanding of the choices behind educational materials.
A similar, but distinct concept, is that of “open research” – the idea that research methodology can be made more transparent, sharing data at all stages of collection, and many other considerations. Finally, if you’re interested in the evolving movement towards open, consider checking out OpenHub, which researches “the impact of open educational resources (OER) on teaching and learning practices.”

February 5, 2019

Update from the new Instructional Design Intern

Hello everyone! My name is Edra, and I am the new Instructional Design Intern here at City Tech. I’m excited to get to know you all! I have been spending some time this week learning about the day-to-day flow at the library and observing some student interactions with librarians at the ref desk. As a UX designer, I am interested in seeing how daily tasks and operations in the library translate on the library’s website.

My goal is to make everyone’s experience on the City Tech library website just as interactive and useful as it is in real life. This will require some prototyping of the LibGuides page, recruiting research participants, and conducting card-sort studies. Additionally, I’ll be researching some social media strategies that may help us share the wealth of resources we have to offer to students, both in-person and online.

February 1, 2019

The Labor of “Open”

One of the latest questions surrounding OER is how best to sustain the growing movement towards free, openly-licensed materials. The current model has been mostly grant-funded, and powered by a widespread interest in lowering the costs of education.

One article for InsideHigherEd, “Open Resources in an Age of Contingency,” observes a relationship between OER and part-time (or “contingent“) faculty members. Others have speculated that a key towards true integration of OER (and other open practices) into higher education will center around issues of faculty workload, tenure and promotion.

The Role of Educational Technology

OER typically rely upon online platforms, so that they can be made accessible for students. Here at CityTech, most OER course sites are hosted on the OpenLab, which is created “by a team that includes City Tech faculty, staff, and current and former students” as an “an open-source digital platform.” This allows for the true involvement of CityTech community members, who will shape the ways the OpenLab develops.
There are many other platforms (including for-profit business) that offer their services to colleges and universities, such as Lumen Learning, TopHat, and others. Part of the question about maintaining the spirit of “open” involves questions of how and why resources are made “free” – and at what potential risk to student privacy and other data.

January 25, 2019

Critiques of “Open”

Across higher education, “open” has gained traction as a buzzword, attached to many disparate and conceptual topics – Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Research, and more. Some have questioned the core ethos of the movement, and how the push towards openness can create new tensions around issues of sharing, privacy, research methods and more.

“Restless water” by Tomasz Baranowski is licensed under CC BY 2.0

David Gaertner, a member of the First Nations Studies Department at the University of British Columbia, writes compellingly of the historical lineage of Western research methods into Indigenous communities, and the relationship to language used in promoting Open Access (OA) scholarship. For Gaertner and others, “OA has very real consequences for Indigenous peoples, insofar as it contributes to neo-Enlightenment ideologies of entitlement to knowledge.” As someone positioned within the field as “a non-Indigenous scholar who works with Indigenous communities,” Gaertner describes himself as familiar with the importance of recognizing community boundaries, and the flexibility/responsiveness required to do so.
Using the hashtags – #openforwho #openforwhat – Gaertner asks us to question our own presumptions of access, and whether closure, in some cases, may actually serve as a “a path to openness.” For example, the concept of preserving the intention/spirit/context of an item by not allowing its public viewing, but intentionally restricting access to associated communities or groups.
In a response piece on her own blog, OER educator Christina Hendricks writes of the tensions between privacy and closure – and how the latter is arguably “more about respecting the appropriate boundaries of spaces, conversations, and knowledges given the context of what those are.” Considering these questions is critical to the developing path of OA, OER, and other developments under the wider umbrella of public scholarship.

January 21, 2019

OER and Access

Much of the buzz around Open Educational Resources (OER) has been driven by the very legitimate goal of lowering educational costs – particularly, the increasing price of textbooks from traditional publishers. Financial considerations are a defining aspect of the student educational experience, and OER has helped to mediate these issues by offering a free, zero-cost option.

“nothing” by Katy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

On the flip side, however, there are ways in which OER presents new challenges, especially for students with limited access to technology. Although the principles of OER theoretically extend to all forms of media (a printed course packet is equally “open” if it is openly-licensed and free of charge), OER are typically presented via online platforms or course sites. This does guarantee that any student has immediate, 24/7 access to the material from all devices (mobile phone, laptop, desktop computer, tablet).
At the same time, many students are primarily dependent on their mobile phones for internet access, and thereby restricted to viewing course materials on a tiny screen. In their 2014 study, “Commuter Students Using Technology,” co-authors Smale and Regalado found that for some CUNY undergraduates, the availability of campus computers/technology was “a critical factor in their daily college experience.” Many spoke of sharing computers with other family members, and relying upon their mobile phones for a way to compose written class assignments (as opposed to a more traditional word processing program on a laptop or desktop computer).
These considerations are something to keep in mind while building OER course sites: is the site responsive to viewing from mobile devices? Are there ways to improve site readability, with tweaks to its structure, attribution practices, and descriptive hyperlinks? At the same time, we might also open ourselves to larger questions of how and why educational materials are provided to students, and in what contexts the word “access” is used.

January 18, 2019

OER and Student Privacy

Open Educational Resources (OER) are increasingly being used across the country (and the world) as an alternative to high-priced textbooks from traditional publishers. In many ways, OER offer new ways to engage students, and modify the course content to their needs. However, because OER rely primarily on digital platforms, issues of student privacy must also be considered.

“Flashlight” by Hans Christian Haaland is licensed under CC BY 2.0

For example, many OER courses make it possible for students to post their reflections on a blog section of the site, or even collectively annotate a text online. But, what are the ethics of making student work publicly available for all to see? This concern is especially relevant when work being posted may reflect their learning process, and in the case of a blog post, writing that has not undergone an editing process or peer-review.
Another question about privacy and OER pertains to names and identity online. Robin DeRosa, OER educator, reflects about the issues that “working in public” create: “They may (will) face vicious harassment, racism, sexism, homophobia… depending on the kind of work they do or the kind of digital profiles they put forward.” DeRosa also acknowledges that the quality of their work may “come back to haunt [students] when they look for a job,” given the increasingly comprehensive screenings by HR firms. Writing for Forbes, Barbara Kurshan similarly speculates that the “elephant in the room” with EdTech is student privacy, spanning the use of advertising-driven technologies as well as the sale of individual data.
One alternative would be to offer students the option of using a pseudonym throughout the duration of the course, for their online or public-facing coursework. Another option is to take the opportunity to explore digital risks and safety concerns, as a part of the course itself. In an increasingly digital world, the potential of OER and other online teaching platforms is weighted by the same issues that affect and mediate online activity in other fields, and should be considered as a fundamental aspect of “teaching in the open,” or open pedagogy.

Author: Nora Almeida