Category: Open Educational Resources

You may have heard the term “ZTC.” What does it mean?
ZTC indicates that a course is Zero Textbook Cost. That’s right – no required textbooks that cost money: everything is free!
The assigned course materials will all be available to you on a course site, and you can print them out or download to your devices. This is made possible through a series of grants from New York State, with the goal of lessening the costs of attending college.
If you like the idea of free course materials, consider registering for a ZTC course! ZTC could be on any subject – it just means that whether the class is in Math, Biology, or English, you won’t be required to pay for any books. 

How do I register for ZTC courses? 

We can take a look in CUNYFirst, during Registration, to find out which ones are being offered. The box called “Course Attribute” (highlighted below) can be changed to ZERO Textbook Cost. Then you can see which classes might be using this model of free materials.

Also, if you have questions, you can always stop by the “Ask A Librarian” desk. We’re happy to help out.

In our blog post series, we’ve explored how OER offer an alternative to high textbook costs, rely on Creative Commons licenses to enable sharing/distribution, and represent an educational trend that is spreading across CUNY  and beyond.
Part of this widespread excitement stems from the ways that OER allow for new interactions between students and course content.

One option is to integrate student feedback into the course texts themselves. Plymouth State University Professor Robin DeRosa notes, “Students are the perfect people to help create textbooks, since they are the most keenly tuned in to what other students will need in order to engage with the material in meaningful ways.” On her blog, DeRosa explains that there are many ways to do this – for example, by adding Hypothesis to a website and enabling live, interactive annotation.
The Wikipedia Foundation proposes that engagement with its sites can be educational. A student involved with one of their projects reflects, “Where a paper will most likely only be read by a single professor, these edits are documented on the web for all to see. While the stakes are high, so are the rewards.”

If you’re interested in learning more about how to engage students with OER, check out “A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students,” itself an open textbook compiled by Rebus Community, and with contributions from multiple authors.

We know that Open Educational Resources (OER) help students to save money on textbook costs, but how else can they be useful? Let’s take a look at some of the other aspects of OER, and how they’re being put into place across CUNY. 

1.  Beyond Textbook Costs
Ann Fiddler, CUNY OER Librarian, explains some of the other advantages, such as increased faculty involvement, ease of use, and even student engagement. As she notes in the article, “The students aren’t just passive consumers of what they read; they’re actively creating new knowledge.”     
2. Achieving the Dream 

CUNY received a grant, at three community colleges, to build up their selection of Zero-Cost Courses.  The project is being implemented at 38 community colleges across 13 states, and “is designed to help remove financial roadblocks that can derail students’ progress and to spur other changes in teaching and learning and course design that will increase the likelihood of degree and certificate completion.” 
3. CUNY/SUNY Collaboration
Open NYS is the shared site for OER resources at CUNY and SUNY – be sure to check out their selection of open textbooks, and tips on creating new OER.

4. OER in Academic Works

You may have heard of CUNY Academic Works – and the institutional repository now includes  a section for OER created by CUNY faculty. You can search by campus or by type. If you’re converting your course to OER, this is a great place to look for materials that originated from CUNY.
Other Resources
Lastly – if you’d like to take a detailed look at OER across CUNY, check out this piece, which is based on notes from a 2017 meeting of the Discipline Council.  
And don’t forget to review our previous blog posts, for tips on finding OER  Textbooks, Understanding Creative Commons Licensing, and more! 

We’ve noted before how Open Educational Resources (OER) represent a “galaxy of opportunity,” as reflected in the current library display. Let’s take a closer look at what makes them an exciting educational trend.

OER and the Five R’s

When people talk about OER, they frequently refer to the “five R’s.”

1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)”                                                                                                                                         – David Wiley, (http://opencontent.org/definition/)

These categories help to explain the purpose of using an open license for your work. Creative Commons licenses open up these possibilities, and therefore a “galaxy” of options for users – they can choose whether to use the material as is, redistribute it to students for free, translate it into another language, etc.

Remix – The most exciting R 

It’s the fifth “R” – remix – that represents the full potential of OER. “Remix” indicates that a future user can actually modify the content – as long as they give credit to the original creator.

If you’re wondering whether an item is available to “remix,” just look to the license!
CC BY is the most open Creative Commons license, because it places no limits on future use. When you see this license, it means that you, the user, can “remix” the content to your heart’s content – edit the text, add pictures, and use a portion or the whole. The only rule is that you indicate who its original creator was, by adding an attribution (we’ll look at that topic in an upcoming blog post).
 

We’ve heard a lot about OER at CityTech, and there have been recent pushes to fund Open Educational Resources at CUNY and SUNY. Now, let’s take a look at OER in the worldwide context!

OER: A Worldwide Movement

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) hosted the first Global OER Forum in 2002, which lead to the Paris OER Declaration – an effort to encourage OER support at the government level.

Why this global interest? As the Slovenian education minister notes, “OER is one of the ways to make education really inclusive, accessible, and open to everyone.”

A World of Possibilities

OERAfrica is one example of a site that brings together policy, research, and links to educational content. The project is geographically-specific, devoted to “to harness OER practices in ways that resolve some of the deep-seated pedagogical challenges facing African higher education institutions.”
Another interesting project is the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages, “a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory of Australia.”

Developed under a Creative Commons license, the site hopes to integrate “collaborative research work with the Indigenous communities,” and includes full text books in languages like Djambarrpuyŋu, Golumala, and Ḻiya-galawumirr.

The Future of OER?

As we can see, there are a variety of efforts towards making content more available to a worldwide audience, and openly-licensed, as OER. In a future post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the context in which this movement developed, and critiques along the way.

New OER Funding
This month, CUNY and SUNY were each awarded an additional $4 million dollars in state funding, to help contribute to the Open Educational Resources Initiative. Sources estimate that by Spring 2019, up to $28 million may be saved in textbook and materials costs. 
New OER Creation
As part of the program, some faculty are being funded to create new OER resources. Let’s look at some examples!
One recently published textbook from SUNY OER Services is Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations, by Michelle Bonczek Evory. The text offers an introduction to the craft of poetry, with practical suggestions about starting out, as well as theoretical engagement with the concepts of play, physicality of language, and poetic form. 
Being an OER, the book is 100% free – to everyone. You can download it as a PDF or EBook format, or simply read it online.
Another example is “Foundations of Homecare,” also produced by SUNY. Intended as a training resource for those aspiring to be Personal Care Assistants or Home Health Aides, the book is embedded with quizzes that track learning progress, as well as links to word definitions and concepts.
It’s interesting to note that the Creative Commons license used for this Ebook is CC BY, which is the most permissive of the licenses – the most “open.”
CC BY only requires that a user cite the original creator; future users can use the content for any purpose (commercial or non-commercial), and also “remix” the content by adding to it.
The authors may have chosen this license so that the book can be adapted as a training manual as part of a business or commercial enterprise. The Creative Commons license allows for this kind of mixed use, whereas under copyright, they would have to purchase a copy or subscription to the text. 
More OER Textbooks 
If you’d like to check out other texts being developed by SUNY, there’s a list here, with statistics about their current use.