Good for all: Academic Works for OERs

This is a repost of a blog from Dec. 2020. Although you may think of Academic Works as a platform for faculty research, it is also home to a robust and growing collection of open educational and OER content created at every CUNY campus.

As a reminder, adding your OER syllabus or course outline to Academic Works is a CUNY-wide requirement for OER fellows. If you would prefer, the library would be happy to work with you (contact Prof. Monica Berger to add your material on your behalf) but it is easy to do so on your own.

Today’s post focuses on why adding your OER or open textbook to Academic Works greatly benefits you in a variety of ways. Academic Works serves several functions. It preserves and documents the output of CUNY whether related to scholarship or to teaching in the open. Another key function of Academic Works it that it makes content much easier to find. Material added to Academic Works is indexed by Google and Google Scholar. Major OER repositories and hubs harvest OER content in Academic Works including OERCommons, TeachOER, and Teaching Commons. This helps OER creators outside of City Tech find and adapt your work.

Academic Works further benefits you by allowing you to document the impact of your work. Download metrics for your material in Academic Works can be added as evidence on your PARSE. Academic Works also has a widget that allows readers to comment on how a specific item helped them. Knowing who has adapted or taught with your open textbook or OER demonstrates the excellence of your work!

Since City Tech uses a non-static platform, OpenLab, for our OER Fellows program, it is difficult to neatly document any specific OER. Our solution is to share your syllabus or course outline and link to your OER. This helps other faculty discover your work. Here’s our most downloaded syllabus:

Introduction to Anthropology, ANTH 1101, Syllabus, Lisa Pope Fischer

Open textbooks and lab manuals in pdf format are easy to add to Academic Works. BIO2450L Genetics Laboratory Manual is the overall most downloaded item in our OER collection with over 7500 downloads.

Please feel free to reach out to me, Prof. Monica Berger, if you have any questions about Academic Works at mberger@citytech.cuny.edu.