Category: Open Educational Resources

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Faculty Workshop, November 20, Peer Review & OER

Peer Review & OER
Wednesday, November 20th, 11am-12pm

In this workshop, we will explain the differences between open and traditional peer review models, share existing examples of review processes for open educational resources, and discuss the needs and wants of faculty as they relate to review of OER.

Register in advance for this meeting on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Participants are encouraged to bring questions to the sessions; no level of familiarity with the topic is required. Workshops will be conducted remotely over Zoom. Part-time faculty who participate will be compensated at their hourly non-teaching adjunct rate for attending.

If you have any questions about this workshop, please contact Joshua Peach, OER Librarian, at jpeach@citytech.cuny.edu

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Call for Applicants: January 2025 Open Educational Practices Institute for Part-Time Faculty

The OER Team at City Tech Library is seeking applications for the January Open Educational Practices Institute for Part-Time Faculty. (Chairs and full-time faculty, please recommend to your part-time colleagues!) The Institute provides asynchronous and synchronous virtual training on using free and openly-licensed materials for courses and foregrounding student-centered pedagogical approaches.

More specifically, participants will learn and discuss:

  • How to identify OER and other free and open resources
  • How copyright, open licensing, and fair use works in the context of course materials
  • How to make your course materials more accessible
  • How to bring student-centered pedagogy into your open educational practices

As a culmination to the intensive, participants will redesign a class activity or assignment using free and open resources that incorporate student-centered pedagogical principles. To qualify as a 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

Eligibility

Part-time faculty members at City Tech in any discipline with an active appointment are eligible to apply.

Faculty commitments/compensation

Participants will be compensated with a $1200 stipend for a commitment of 20 hours of project work, including asynchronous work and synchronous virtual training sessions. Participants will need to be available to attend all four synchronous sessions to receive the stipend. The final project must be completed by Friday, February 14, 2025.

Institute Dates

  • Thursday, January 9th, 2025, 10am-12pm
  • Tuesday, January 14th, 2025, 10am-12pm
  • Thursday, January 16th, 2025, 10am-12pm
  • Tuesday, January 21st, 2025, 10am-12pm

 

Please fill out the OEP Institute application by November 25, 2024. If you have questions about the Institute or application process, please contact Joshua Peach, OER Librarian

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Celebrate Open Access Week 2024 with open engineering textbooks

Cover of Circuit Analysis and Design

At the University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing Services is dedicated to open access scholarship in a variety of ways, including participating in the Free Electrical and Computer Engineering Textbook Initiative. This program has been adopted by over 500 U.S. colleges and universities, and has saved students an estimated $50 million in textbook costs. 

  • Students: these textbooks can serve as supplements to your existing textbooks
  • Faculty: you can adapt or adopt parts or the entirety of these textbooks in your teaching
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Faculty Workshop, September 30, Introduction to Social Annotation

Introduction to Social Annotation
Monday, September 30th, 3pm-4pm
with Jenna Spevack, Professor of Communication Design at City Tech

Social annotation (or collaborative annotation) allows readers to interact with a text as well as with other readers through highlighting, commenting, and sharing ideas in the margins. Learn more about digital tools that can allow you and your students to engage with open texts in your classes, asking and answering questions, defining difficult words, adding reference images and links, and practicing the essential skill of close reading.

Register in advance for this meeting on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Participants are encouraged to bring questions to the sessions; no level of familiarity with the topic is required. Workshops will be conducted remotely over Zoom. Part-time faculty who participate will be compensated at their hourly non-teaching adjunct rate for attending.

If you have any questions about this workshop, please contact Joshua Peach, OER Librarian.

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Fall 2024 Open Educational Resources Workshops

As the new semester begins, the Open Educational Resources team at City Tech Library would like to invite you to learn more about free and open educational resources (OER) and how they can support instruction and student access to course materials in your classes. From the basics of OER to more advanced topics, workshops will be offered over the Fall semester on the following topics:

Introduction to Open Educational Resources
Wednesday, September 18th, 11am-12pm

This workshop will provide an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and related topics such copyright, Creative Commons licensing, Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC), and where to find free and open materials in your discipline.

Register in advance for this meeting on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Introduction to Social Annotation
Monday, September 30th, 3pm-4pm
with Jenna Spevack, Professor of Communication Design at City Tech

Social annotation (or collaborative annotation) allows readers to interact with a text as well as with other readers through highlighting, commenting, and sharing ideas in the margins. Learn more about digital tools that can allow you and your students to engage with open texts in your classes, asking and answering questions, defining difficult words, adding reference images and links, and practicing the essential skill of close reading.

Register in advance for this meeting on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Introduction to Manifold
Wednesday, October 23, 11:00am-12:30pm
with Robin Miller, Open Educational Technology Specialist at the Graduate Center

Manifold is a free digital publishing platform for the entire CUNY community, where you can create and share your own scholarship, custom classroom versions of texts and textbooks that are openly licensed or in the public domain, Open Educational Resources (OER), journals, or use Manifold Reading Groups to build your own course reader. Come find out more about the platform and how to get started using Manifold in your teaching at CUNY!

Register in advance for this meeting on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Peer Review & OER
Wednesday, November 20th, 11am-12pm

In this workshop, we will explain the differences between open and traditional peer review models, share existing examples of review processes for open educational resources, and discuss the needs and wants of faculty as they relate to review of OER.

Register in advance for this meeting on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

 

Participants are encouraged to bring questions to the sessions; no level of familiarity with OER is required. Workshops will be conducted remotely over Zoom. Part-time faculty who participate will be compensated at their hourly non-teaching adjunct rate for attending.

If you have any questions about these workshops, please contact Joshua Peach at jpeach@citytech.cuny.edu

For questions about other OER initiatives at City Tech, email Anne Leonard at aleonard@citytech.cuny.edu

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New and Noteworthy Open Educational Resources

Every month, the City Tech Library’s Open Educational Resources team gathers the latest and most noteworthy OER to share with the learning community at the college. The field of open educational resources is constantly expanding and we attempt to include materials relevant to each department at City Tech throughout our work. In addition to publishing our findings on the OER at City Tech website, we distribute our monthly selections to our colleagues in the library who share them with the academic departments they work with.

Cover image of Data Analysis in the Psychological Sciences: A Practical, Applied, Multimedia Approach

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials freely available for everyone to use. They are typically openly-licensed to allow for re-use and modification by instructors. Materials may consist of a complete course, course modules, assignments, tests, quizzes, textbooks, videos, etc.

Cover image of Gendered Lives: Global Issues textbook

On occasion, we will spotlight a focused collection of resources that we find particularly useful for current teaching and learning. Last semester, OER librarian Cailean Cooney created a reading list to help support faculty working with open resources and using open educational practices. “Selections include some grounding texts, discussions of pedagogy and OER, access and equity, OER and policy, critiques of OER, and resources to connect faculty with research related to OER. All are openly licensed.” We have also shared a collection of LGBTQ+ free and open resources, curated by librarian Jo Thompson, as well as resources on trauma-informed practices in teaching.

We are here to showcase emerging and interesting open educational resources, so please contact OER librarian Cailean Cooney at ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu if you know of any resources or would like to know more about the OER initiatives at City Tech that include our fellowship, workshops, and faculty support.

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Open Educational Resources for Black History Month

Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are free and openly licensed, and that can be used for teaching, learning, and research. There are many OERs available online for African Studies and African American Studies. City Tech students, staff, and faculty who wish to honor and observe Black History Month could spend some time with one of the Open Educational Resources listed below.

From City Tech

Africana Folklore  This course is designed to help students prepare for further academic study in African, African-American and Caribbean studies. Students learn about the folklore of Africans and their descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean. Readings and films illustrate various ways West African folklore survived in the New World, and how Africans in the Americas created new traditions.

From CUNY 

Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade  This course offers an overview of the political, economic, social, and demographic challenges confronting Africa during the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Yoruba Tradition and Culture  This course examines African civilizations from early antiquity to the decline of the West African Empire of Songhay. It explores a range of social, cultural, technological, and economic changes in Africa. It also discusses African agricultural, social, political, cultural, technological, and economic history.

Other Resources

1619 Project  The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative that aims to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at its center.

African American History  This open textbook covers African American history spanning from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Black Lives Matter movement.

African American History (Yale)  This course examines the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present with a focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction; the  Civil Rights movement and its aftermath; and the leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology   “From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms.”

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience  This site provides “a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework.”

Slave Voyages  The Slave Voyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. It makes available records about the more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas.

Umbra Search – African American History  Umbra Search is a portal to hundreds of thousands of pieces of African American history and culture. It is named after the Umbra Society of the early 1960s, a group of Black writers and poets who helped create the Black Arts Movement.

For more information about Open Education Resources at City Tech, visit the library’s OER program.

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Spotlight: Open Education Resources

For many City Tech students, the high cost of textbooks may be an insurmountable obstacle. Students may not register–or may end up withdrawing or failing classes–because they cannot afford required materials. City Tech Faculty can reduce financial strain on students by designing their courses around Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Open Educational Resources are freely accessible teaching, learning, and research materials. Traditionally, textbooks are published under copyright, with strict limitations. But the OER model is more flexible; it uses Creative Commons licenses that allows educators to retain, reuse, revise, remix, or redistribe (the 5Rs) educational resources.

The 5 Rs:

  • Retain – make, own, and control a copy of the resource
  • Reuse – use original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource  
  • Revise – edit, adapt, and modify copy of the resource
  • Remix – combine original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new
  • Redistribute – share copies of original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others.

City Tech’s OER program is a CUNY success story. Since its launch in 2015, City Tech librarians have collaborated with professors to create course materials through the City Tech OpenLab, leading to the development of free and open resources for classes across the curriculum. City Tech professors, with library support, have created outstanding low-cost, high-quality OERs for students. 

Here are a few examples of OER materials created by faculty in our Social Science departments through the OER program. 

For US History Since 1865, Dr. Ryan McMillen uses The American Yawp, augmented with other materials. Instructions for the class on Reconstruction asks students to: “Read Chapter 15, Reconstruction…the text of the Mississippi Black Codes…Jourdon Anderson Writes His Former Master, 1865…Pick out one part of the Codes that strikes you as problematic, in that its main justification would be to criminalize the activities of former slaves in defending their freedom, and analyze it.”

Professor Diana Mincyte’s Environmental Sociology OER “examines the complex interactions between societies and the natural environments on which they depend. Special emphasis is placed on the link between the deepening ecological crisis and the operation of the capitalist socio-economic system.” For the first class, to introduce the subject, she assigns: The environment and society. The perfect conditions for coronavirus to emerge, Pangolins and pandemics: The real source of this crisis is human, not animal and What is Deep Ecology.

Dr. Jinwon Kim’s Urban Sociology is a course that encourages students to explore issues in Downtown Brooklyn, from gentrification to the new economy, and to use the neighborhood as a laboratory. Dr. Kim created her OER with links to open access readings, videos, and photo collections. For Class 4, Modernity and Modern Cities, he asks students to, “First, read The era of industrialization…in order to learn more about the historical background of modern cities. Second, read Industrial Manchester, 1844 in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Third, learn more about New York City context by reading Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York…Watch The Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side. See Photos provided by Museum of the City of New York.”

More information about the OER program at City Tech. 

Questions/comments? Contact Cailean Cooney, Assistant Professor, Library at: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu.

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Open Educational Resources

The COVID pandemic has affected City Tech faculty, staff, and students in many ways. At the City Tech library, one concern is how to best serve students who are currently unable to access our print resources. While our online databases and ebook collections are an incredible resource, many City Tech students traditionally rely on the library to borrow course textbooks. Reserve textbook collections at City Tech are by far our highest circulating materials because many students can’t afford the expense of buying their own. [The prices of textbooks are notoriously inflated.] 

This problem isn’t unique to City Tech. A recent article in Inside Higher Education (IHE) illustrates that even in academic libraries that have reopened, like the library at Roger Williams University—the small residential school profiled in this piece—librarians and students are frustrated because the demand for course reserves far exceeds the supply. According to the IHE article, “libraries that have built up print reserves of textbooks aren’t able to circulate those materials as they did before the pandemic, either because materials are being quarantined” or because library access is limited. Nicole Allen, an Open Education Resources advocate quoted in the article, notes, “the pandemic has intensified and exposed so many gaps and cracks in our society, and access to course materials is one of them…Students are struggling. So are faculty, and so are libraries.”

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that catching COVID-19 from a book is unlikely, but it still recommends quarantining returned books for at least 24 hours between loans. Since COVID can live on surfaces for 2-3 days, most libraries able to lend books are quarantining books for at least 72 hours to be safe. This means that students who cannot afford the high costs of buying their own textbooks can no longer rely on the library for help, even if their library has reopened. The lack of access to course reserves means many students are unable to do the assigned reading, complete homework, or study for exams. 

The challenges created by COVID have been a wake-up call for many issues, in many areas of our lives. The issue of access to course materials may not be as critical as access to decent healthcare, but it is still important, especially for students doing their best to learn under extraordinary circumstances. If students are going to succeed, faculty and librarians will need to be creative and work together on solutions to make sure students have access to the materials they need to complete their course work. 

One solution is to shift from the use of expensive textbooks to alternatives like Open Educational Resources (OER) and electronic material already licensed by the library.  Open educational resources are teaching and learning materials freely available for everyone to use. They are typically openly-licensed to allow for re-use and modification by instructors. Materials may consist of a complete course, course modules, assignments, tests, quizzes, textbooks, videos, etc.

To learn more about using OER and textbooks alternatives in your course, check out this guide to remote teaching resources for faculty created by City Tech librarians. City Tech also has an active project about developing OER and training faculty on their creation and use.  

If you have questions about library resources, open textbooks, or fair use for sharing materials with students, subject specialist librarians are available to help. Contact the library subject specialist for your department or program with any questions about library resources and services.

Getting Started: Open Textbook Library Workshop for Faculty

When: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 from 2:30 – 4, virtually

RSVP to: Joanna Thompson, jthompson@citytech.cuny.edu

Join a workshop about the Open Textbook Library, “a catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks” developed at the University of Minnesota. Other topics will include: an introduction to Open Educational Resources (O.E.R.), and how to find openly-licensed resources in your field. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, and no level of familiarity with O.E.R. is required. A $250 stipend is available for faculty who complete a review of an openly-licensed textbook.

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Expanded Access to EResources During the COVID-19 Crisis

For the rest of the semester, many publishers have offered expanded access to online resources in an effort to support the sudden move to online learning.  

This guide is a list of some of the free vendor resources and City Tech eresources that you can access at home.  It is a work in progress as new resources are in process.

Some eresource highlights include expanded access to Gale, EBSCO, Bloomsbury, EBook Central, and JSTOR.

Most of the resources can be accessed using your City Tech Library barcode.  Here are instructions for accessing library materials from home.  If you have trouble with accessing any library resources, please email kabrams@citytech.cuny.edu.

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