Announcements – Page 2 – OER Fellowship

Upcoming OpenLab Workshops

This Fall, consider attending a workshop with the OpenLab! Check out the list of all the great options (below), also included on this printable flyer.

OPENLAB FACULTY AND STAFF WORKSHOPS — SEPTEMBER 2018
*Newly attending part-time faculty receive a stipend for participation.

DESIGNING AND ASSESSING WORK ON THE OPENLAB
Thursday 9/13, 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm (L540 – in Library)
Do you want to create online interaction with your students and also be able to assess it within the OpenLab? This workshop shares useful penLab tools for blogging and assessing student work and helps you to brainstorm assignment design for your OpenLab course. Please note: An OpenLab account is required! RSVP http://bit.ly/152nATa

OCTOBER 2018

SUPPORTING STUDENT SUCCESS ON THE OPENLAB
Thursday October 4th, 2:30pm-4:00pm (G604)
Learn how to use the new course cloning feature, a new OpenLab functionality to promote collaborative pedagogy while building from existing models. RSVP http://bit.ly/152nATa

OPEN PEDAGOGY EVENTS – FALL 2018
*Refreshments will be served; Part-time faculty receive a stipend for participation.

OPEN DIGITAL PEDAGOGY IN GATEWAY COURSES
Thursday 9/27, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm (N227)
Come discuss how to help students succeed in introductory courses across the curriculum, looking to the successful model of City Tech and BMCC’s Title V grant-funded project, “Opening Gateways to Completion: Open Digital Pedagogies for Student Success in STEM.

REMIXING AND SHARING IN OPEN DIGITAL PEDAGOGY

Thursday 10/18, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm (N227)

Come discuss the ethics and responsibilities of remixing and sharing in open digital pedagogy, & learn about new functionality for cloning and adapting content on the OpenLab.

OFFICE HOURS FALL 2018
Monday, 10:00am – 2:00pm 9/17, 10/15, 11/19, 12/10
Wednesday 12:00pm – 2:00pm 8/28, 9/25, 10/23, 11/27
Friday, 12:00pm – 2:00pm 9/7, 10/5, 11/2, 12/7
All office hours take place in the conference room of the Faculty Commons, N227.

JOIN OPENLAB PROJECT SITES FOR MORE!
The Open Road is your one-stop-shop for everything OpenLab. The site including monthly development updates, our blog series, ‘In the Spotlight’ and up-to-date information on workshops, office hours and OL events!

Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab aims to generate community and discussion around digital pedagogy on the OpenLab. Faculty and staff can pose questions, stimulate discussion and share teaching materials, resources and ideas related to teaching and learning on the OpenLab. We also share information on our Open Pedagogy events, which are CUNY-wide events held at City Tech where we discuss particular aspects of critical digital pedagogy. Past topics have included Open Educational Resources, Writing and Open Digital Pedagogy, and Annotating Digital Texts.

OER Resources

For ease of reference, we’ve compiled this page of resources from the Summer Intensive.

Finding OER

George Mason MetaFinder – This tool helps to search through multiple OER respositories at once; consider it the “Google” of OER.

Some prefer to search through individual repositories instead – here are a few options: OER Commons ; OpenStax ; College Open Textbooks

Creative Commons licenses

About the licenses – A guide to the different licenses, and what they offer.

As a mini-refresher, here’s our recent blog post about Creative Commons.

Attribution

Open Attribution Builder– If you’re using a photo/image or other specific item, just drop the information in for an instant attribution, to paste into your site.

The OpenLab

This is a document with a list of helpful tools and information about how to create your site on the OpenLab – widgets, tools, and more!

Pedagogy, Usability, and Accessibility

Accessibility Best Practices

Accessibility Toolkit – An open textbook about accessibility, designed to provide guidance for content creators.

OER at CUNY/SUNY

Open SUNY – Textbooks created by SUNY faculty with open licensing.

CUNY Academic Works – You can find OER in the CUNY institutional repository, by searching via the above link.

Final Steps

Library Permalinker – If you’re linking to something that’s in the library, just copy and paste the original URL of the item into this toolbar, and it will shorten it.

And lastly – as you complete your site, take a moment to review the OER Creation Checklist, as a quick way to cover all the bases.

Seminar 3 Highlights (3/23): Pedagogy, Usability, and Accessibility

Hi everyone,

Here’s a copy of the seminar slides. Also including a digital version of the Accessibility Best Practices for the OpenLab handout. Please feel free to get in contact if you need help locating materials or if you have licensing and fair use questions. If you’re get started on your OpenLab site feel free to contact the OpenLab team with questions; their email openlab@citytech.cuny.edu. They’re always someone available to follow up with you.

Enjoy spring break and I’ll see you on April 13th!

Seminar 2 Highlights (3/16): Licensing & Finding/Selecting OER

Hi all,

Here’s a copy of today’s seminar slides.

Today we talked about how many different learning objects might be incorporated into your OER.

What about assigning an NPR podcast or an article from the Washington Post website? Great! All you need to do is include the links to them on your OER site. This way students are sent directly to the author / publisher’s publicly available version of the resource. It’s perfectly fine to assign free materials available on the web by linking directly to them.

The place to be cautious is with PDFs floating around on the web. Unless you see a Creative Commons license on that PDF, you’ll want to consider if it looks like it’s been posted by someone other than the copyright holder (copyright holder would be the author or publisher). It’s common for PDFs to be posted without permission from the copyright holder, in which case they’re copyright violations and are especially likely to be removed from the internet.

What’s interesting about finding public domain and Creative Commons materials to incorporate into your OER is the extra flexibility you have in how you can use them. Most Creative Commons licenses give you permission to remix and adapt the learning object to your preferences, although the somewhat more “restrictive” CC licenses, specifically non-derivatives, don’t permit you to modify but they do let you post and distribute the materials more freely. For instance, you can upload a PDF or Word file version onto your OER to ensure stable access to students.

We also talked about fair use and finding resources in your discipline. Be sure to reach out to us if you have questions about fair use and finding materials along the way. See you all next Friday!

Seminar 1 Highlights (2/9): OER Fundamentals

Hi there- Thanks for such an engaging first seminar. The slides from the session are available to download (PDF).

Guidelines for designating a course section “zero cost” in CUNYFirst

Faculty! There’s a new CUNYFirst attribute for course materials that are zero-cost to students. Download this Word doc for directions on how to designate your class section with the “ZERO Textbook Cost” attribute.

Highlights from Seminar 3 (11/3): Pedagogy, Access, and Usability

Hi everyone,

Finally getting around to posting materials/discussion points from our third seminar. Here are the session slides and the rubric we used for the initial activity.

And a brief summary below.

Essential accessibility tips

Choose an accessible theme from the list on the Accessibility Best Practices for the OpenLab document
Check to see if PDFs you post to the site are accessible:
1. In Adobe Acrobat X Pro, select View > Tools > Accessibility (Alt+V+T+A). The Accessibility Tool pane will be revealed. Select “Full Check.”
Fill out the Alt Text when you upload a photo to the media library

Essential usability tips

A few points we didn’t get to cover because we ran out of time:

Information Architecture (drawn from Nora’s usability study findings):
1. Balance the amount of content presented
2. Keep the # of menu items (pages) on your site to between 3-7 (5 is optimal)
3. Keep consistent language across the site / syllabus / classroom
4. Use one level of submenu
5. Make sure links open in new tabs
Student preferences (drawn from Cailean’s study with students using OER):
1. Students like having everything they need to complete the course in one place (even if that means linking to Blackboard for students to complete an assessment)
2. Students like when multimedia is integrated into the curriculum
3. Students like when the course readings are targeted and more concise

Using the Course Profile to organize class discussions

LIB/ARCH2205 Learning Places forum

Nora’s takeaways:

Likes:

-It’s the only way in OpenLab to create a threaded response where students are replying to one prompt

-Responses don’t get buried by subsequent discussions

-Prevents confusion if you also use OpenLab for formal assignment submission

Challenges:

-Lives on course profile so requires some explicit tech instruction

-No option for grading / replying privately as with posts

Pictures from the card sort activity!

(Click to enlarge)

Highlights from Seminar 2 (10/20): Finding/Selecting OER & Licensing

Thanks for a lively session last Friday! Download a copy of the seminar slides (including agenda and content covered) and the “Evaluating Content for your OER” worksheet.

Following up on a couple of thoughts:

Bring scholarly content into your OER: a lot of journal articles, book chapters, and more is available Open Access via the author’s institutional repository. You can most easily find out if this is the case by searching the item via Google Scholar. Please feel free to ask Monica (mberger@citytech.cuny.edu) for help.
Assign digital library materials: you’ll want to create a “permalink” to that material so students are prompted to login with their library credentials when offsite. Let Cailean know if you have questions on this.
Example wording for assigning a Creative Commons license to something you’ve adapted:
1. This work, “90fied”, is a derivative of “Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco” by tvol, used under CC BY. “90fied” is licensed under CC BY by [Your name here].
2. This work, entitled “Version 2”, by First Lastname, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License is based on “Version 1” [with URL hyperlinked] by First Lastname, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
3. See more directions/examples via the Creative Commons wiki

Highlights from Seminar 1 (10/6): OER Fundamentals

Great working with everyone last Friday. It was really interesting to learn a bit more about your motivations behind transitioning to OER. Some included the desire to integrate materials that are more relevant to students’ daily lives, to address textbook costs, to improve course coordination, and access to / dissemination of materials.

Slides from the first seminar are available here.

See the link to the Creative Commons’ search filter that Junior mentioned: https://search.creativecommons.org/

And below documents our notes as we considered what makes a successful OER.

Highlights from Seminar 2: Selecting resources & Licensing

Following up here with documentation relevant to today’s seminar. Also, if you’d like assistance embedding a CC license into the footer of your OER site, see the OpenLab workshop/office hours and/or check out the resources on the “Help” tab on the OpenLab’s main menu.

Lecture slides from the second seminar are available here.
Download the seminar activity worksheet
Fellows mentioned several digital resources that can be useful for finding course content
Notes for adopting existing resources and creating your own resources
Diagramming what “category” our resources fall into (based on worksheet)…yay no copyright violations here!

Category: Announcements