New and Noteworthy is the City Tech Library OER Team’s bi-weekly roundup of new and noteworthy OER. We try to include at least one OER relevant to each school at City Tech in every post. At the end of the month, these resources will be compiled and distributed by the library liaison for your department. Please contact us if you know of new or particularly interesting OER to share with our colleagues or would like more information about OER initiatives at City Tech.
Arts & Sciences
- Microbiology: A Laboratory Experience, by Holly Ahern, SUNY Adirondack (2018). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“This text provides a series of laboratory exercises compatible with a one-semester undergraduate microbiology or bacteriology course with a three- or four-hour lab period that meets once or twice a week. The design of the lab manual conforms to the American Society for Microbiology curriculum guidelines and takes a ground-up approach — beginning with an introduction to biosafety and containment practices and how to work with biological hazards. From there the course moves to basic but essential microscopy skills, aseptic technique and culture methods, and builds to include more advanced lab techniques.”
- Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers of English, Iowa State University (2020). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“This digital book is meant to serve [as] an instructional tool for both learners and teachers in the field of pronunciation. Topics covered include vowel and consonant sounds, word stress, thought groups, prominence, and intonation.”
Professional Studies
- Graduate Research Methods in Social Work, by Matt DeCarlo, Cory Cummings, Kate Agnelli, Open Social Work Education (2021). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“We designed our book to help graduate social work students through every step of the research process, from conceptualization to dissemination. Our textbook centers cultural humility, information literacy, pragmatism, and an equal emphasis on quantitative and qualitative methods. It includes extensive content on literature reviews, cultural bias and respectfulness, and qualitative methods, in contrast to traditionally used commercial textbooks in social work research.” - The K-12 Educational Technology Handbook, by Anne Ottenbreit-Leftwich & Royce Kimmons, EdTech Books (2019). License: CC BY
“As a teacher working in an elementary or a secondary school, it is very likely that you need to face a crucial reality – having limited time to deal with all kinds of school duties, including developing lesson plans, creating teaching materials, and documenting student learning progress, etc. This reality in K-12 educational settings could be particularly overwhelming if you are a beginning teacher. Luckily, with the advent of technology and the emergence of K-12 Open Educational Resources (OER), more free and quality resources have become available for K-12 teachers. OER allows teachers to save the time creating teaching materials from scratch, yet still have access to materials that support student learning engagement.”
Technology & Design
- Building Information – Representation and Management: Fundamentals and Principles, by Alexander Koutamanis, TU Delft (2019). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“The book presents a coherent theory of building information, focusing on its representation and management in the digital era. It addresses issues such as the information explosion and the structure of analogue building representations to propose a parsimonious approach to the deployment and utilization of symbolic digital technologies like BIM.”
- Ports and Waterways: Navigating the changing world, by Mark van Koningsveld, Henk Verheij, Poonam Taneja, Huib de Vriend, TU Delft & Delft University of Technology (2021). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“[This book] integrates the content of a number of separate lecture notes we used in our teaching activities and updates this information where relevant. The integration reflects our vision that ports and waterways should be viewed as parts of a coherent system that supports waterborne supply chains, and that their integral design and operation is essential.”
Cailean Cooney, Assistant Professor, OER Librarian: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu
Rena Grossman, Adjunct OER Librarian: rgrossman@citytech.cuny.edu
Joshua Peach, Adjunct Reference & OER Librarian: jpeach@citytech.cuny.edu
Joanna Thompson, Adjunct OER Librarian: jthompson@citytech.cuny.edu