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).
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.”
