Opening Gateways is a 5 year collaboration between the New York City College of Technology and the Borough of Manhattan Community College with the goal of supporting student success in gateway mathematics courses for STEM disciplines (read more about Opening Gateways).  The first year of the Opening Gateways project came to close on September 30th, 2016. It has been a very full year as the grant team has worked to plan and implement the first Faculty Seminar, to develop a suite of Open Education Resources for the initial courses at City Tech (MAT 1275) and BMCC (MAT 056), and initiate various other projects at both campuses.  Here is a brief look at our activities so far:

Opening Gateways Faculty Seminar

The seminar teams at both campuses have collaborated to plan, recruit and begin implementing an intensive year-long faculty professional development program.  The Faculty Seminar kicked off in September 2016 with an initial cohort of 24 participants (12 from each campus).  Faculty members have so far explored active learning, open digital pedagogy, open educational resources, flipped classrooms,  and other topics, with upcoming seminars on topics including WeBWorK, video development, advisement best practices, and STEM application development.  In the Spring semester our faculty fellows will be implementing these techniques in the classroom and reporting back on the results.  You can take a closer look at the faculty seminar activities on the 2016-2017 Opening Gateways Faculty Seminar OpenLab site.

Open Educational Resource Development

Our OER teams have developed a complete suite of WeBWorK assignments for the initial gateway courses at each campus, integrating new WeBWorK technology like scaffolded problems and adaptive assignments.  These assignments are being piloted in the Fall semester and will be used by the faculty fellows in the Spring semester.   The teams have also worked to expand and enhance the video resources available for faculty,  producing new videos as well as developing a topic-based directory of exemplary pre-existing content.  Faculty fellows will soon be producing OERs as well, focusing on STEM applications of essential topics, to be implemented in their Spring courses.

WeBWorK/OpenLab Integration

Team members have worked closely with external developers to design and build this exciting technological integration of two open source platforms, WeBWorK and WordPress/BuddyPress (the technology underlying the OpenLab).  The initial release went live in October and is currently being tested in a limited number of sections of MAT 1275 at City Tech – you can take a look at current activity by visiting the WeBWorK on the OpenLab site.