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:
- 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.
- 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:
- Open educational resources that are Creative Commons (openly) licensed, including but not limited to open textbooks
- Public domain materials
- Freely available web resources that do not violate copyright
- Library-licensed digital resources, including articles and ebooks
