New and Noteworthy is the City Tech Library OER Team’s 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

  1. OER: Curso de Escritura en Español by Emilia Illana-Mahiques and Alejandro Pérez Belda, University of Iowa (2020). License: CC BY-NC-SA
    This OER is designed for upper-level Spanish writing courses. The openly licensed website includes peer review training sessions, classroom activities, handouts to guide students’ writing processes, and peer review guidelines.

  2. Intermediate Microeconomics with Excel (Second Edition), by Humberto Barreto, DePaw University (2020). License: CC BY-SA
    “This book is based on the idea that there is a particular framework used by economists to interpret observed reality. This framework has been called the economic way of thinking, the economic approach, and the method of economics. This book is different from the many other books that attempt to teach microeconomics in three ways:
  • It explicitly applies the recipe of the economic approach in every example.
  • It uses concrete examples via Microsoft Excel in every application, which enables the reader to manipulate live graphs and learn numerical methods of optimization.
  • The majority of the content is in the Excel workbooks which the reader uses to create meaning.
    You learn by doing, not by reading.”


Professional Studies

  1. Business Communication for Success, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing (2015). License: CC BY-NC-SA
    “Business Communication for Success (BCS) provides a comprehensive, integrated approach to the study and application of written and oral business communication to serve both student and professor.”

  2. Health Education, by College of the Canyons, College of the Canyons (2018). License: CC BY
    “Readers will learn about the nature of health, health education, health promotion and related concepts. This will help to understand the social, psychological and physical components of health.”


Technology and Design

  1. Media, Society, Culture and You, by Mark Poepsel, Rebus Community (2018). License: CC BY
    “Media, Society, Culture, and You is an approachable introductory Mass Communication text that covers major mass communication terms and concepts including “digital culture.” It discusses various media platforms and how they are evolving as Information and Communication Technologies change.”

  2. A Tale of Two Systems, by René Reitsma and Kevin Krueger, Oregon State University (2017). License: CC BY-NC-SA
    “This is the story of a web-based information system rebuild. The system in question is www.teachengineering.org, a digital library of K-12 engineering curriculum that was built from the ground up with established technology and which for 13 years enjoyed lasting support from its growing user community and its sponsors. These 13 years, however, cover the period during which smart phones and tablets became commonplace, during which the Internet of Things started replacing the Semantic Web, during which NoSQL databases made their way out of the research labs and into everyday development shops, during which we collectively started moving IT functions and services into ‘the cloud,’ and during which computing performance doubled a few times, yet again. In this monograph we provide a side-by-side of this rebuild.”


Cailean Cooney, Assistant Professor, OER Librarian: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu
Joshua Peach, Adjunct Reference & OER Librarian: jpeach@citytech.cuny.edu
Joanna Thompson, Adjunct OER Librarian: jthompson@citytech.cuny.edu