Welcome to the new weekly blog series from the OER Team at the City Tech Library! Each week we will feature a few new or noteworthy open educational resources (OER). We will 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. Teaching with Digital Tools and Apps, UMass Amherst Libraries (2020). License: CC BY-NC-SA
    “With the abundance in education technology (edtech) tools and apps currently available, and new ones popping up in app stores daily, how do you find the right ones for your practice? How do you ensure the digital tools and apps that you select for use in your classroom will enrich and extend your teaching, provide an accessible learning experience, and protect students’ privacy? What should you look for when evaluating the user experience of apps and tools?” Very timely!

  2. Climate Toolkit: A Resource Manual for Science and Action, by Frank D. Granshaw, Portland State University (2020). License: CC BY-NC
    “The Climate Toolkit is a resource manual designed to help the reader navigate the complex and perplexing issue of climate change by providing tools and strategies to explore the underlying science…. Unlike a standard textbook, it is designed to help readers do their own climate research and devise their own perspective rather than providing them with a script to assimilate and repeat.”

Professional Studies

  1. Open Health Collections (Open Michigan)
    “These Open Health Collections are representative samples of available open health educational resources. It includes many collections of openly licensed resources and tools for health sciences. Resources such as textbooks, courses, audio-videos, journals, images, datasets, software, and other mixed content. All of these resources are free for anyone to access worldwide. Many of them are also shared under open licenses that allow copies and modifications.”

  2. W.E. Upjohn Institute Open Access Books, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. License: CC BY-NC-SA
    “The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a private, not-for-profit, nonpartisan, independent research organization, has studied policy-related issues of employment and unemployment since its founding in 1945. The Upjohn Institute’s digital repository, Upjohn Research, serves as the product showcase for the work of our staff and external research partners, archived all the way back to the 1980s. In addition to working papers, books (most of which are open-access) and other items from the Upjohn Press, it also captures our Early Career Research Award projects and summaries of the Institute’s Dissertation Award winners.”

Technology and Design

  1. Be Credible: Information Literacy for Journalism, Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing Students, by Peter S. Bobkowski and Karna Younger, eCampus Ontario (2018). License: CC BY-NC
    “This free and open textbook teaches college-level journalism students, as well as students across other disciplines, to become information experts. Using the themes of credibility and information literacy, the book helps today’s students, who start out all their research with Google and Wikipedia, to specialize in accessing, evaluating, and managing information that often is not accessible through Google searches. The book includes chapters on public records, freedom of information requests, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, scholarly research, public data, interviews and more. Through current examples, instructional videos, suggested classroom activities, and practitioner insights, the authors challenge students to examine the credibility of the sources they use as current and future professional communicators.”

  2. Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I, by Don Johnson, OpenStax CNX (2014). License: CC BY
    “The open course focuses on the creation, manipulation, transmission, and reception of information by electronic means. Elementary signal theory; time- and frequency-domain analysis; Sampling Theorem. Digital information theory; digital transmission of analog signals; error-correcting codes.”

 

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