Open Educational Resource Fellowship

Since my last promotion I have developed Open Educational Resource versions of two courses, Ethics (PHIL 2103) and Philosophy of Law (PHIL 3211). OER is a UNESCO Designation that indicates an educational resource is released under an open license. Creating an OER version of a course involves replacing all existing readings with resources that are open access or otherwise free to students, rewriting rubrics and assignments to accommodate these, designing a public website that shares all materials under the appropriate Creative Commons license, and utilizing best practices for website accessibility. These efforts help students and other faculty at City Tech in a variety of ways, but they also improve my teaching because they require me to read and research widely on covered topics—including many outside of my research areas—to find appropriate readings, and because the required workshops and presentations from the OER team have exposed me to a wide variety of resources on student accessibility and required me to learn to use these in creating my own website. I now use these principles in all my OpenLab sites.

Revising Assignments in an Age of Artificial Intelligence

Generative Artificial Intelligence on websites like ChatGPT has (or should) fundamentally change philosophy teaching. Typical philosophy assignments include term papers that interact critically with well-known texts or ideas. However, such papers are easy to generate using AI and can be relatively difficult to catch. Consequently, I am in the process of redesigning class assignments to disincentivize using AI. Essentially, I require some elements of scaffolded assignments to be developed in class. For example, in my Philosophy of Law course, students are assigned a short piece of text (~3 pages) from a longer assigned reading to outline in class. They are then required to interact with claims and supporting arguments from this outline in their term paper. Although this strategy doesn’t make use of AI impossible, it significantly reduces the incentive to use AI (you can see further explanation in the discussion of this assignment under Assignments). Although I re-designed these assignments in order to prevent cheating, the process has made me a better teacher because I have been forced to design assignments with more structure and accountability than they previously had.

Interdisciplinary Lecture Exchanges

I currently exchange interdisciplinary lectures with several other colleagues at City Tech, typically lecturing in other classes 5-8 times per semester. Our work together to offer ID lectures to our students has forced me to think how philosophy can be integrated productively into courses taught by other disciplines as diverse as economics, history, psychology, health communication, and sociology. Exposure to my colleagues’ teaching in my own course also helps me to think about how to incorporate methods of teaching from other disciplines and how their disciplines can impact philosophical ethics.