Queens College recognizes that a major barrier to the use of OER and other tools of open pedagogy is the challenge of teaching, reading, thinking, and communicating in the digital environment. Therefore, we offer OER Faculty Fellowships to provide participants technical and pedagogical support in transitioning from traditional textbooks to OER.
Through this program, OER Fellows learn the fundamental principles of OER and open pedagogy, develop technical skills to create and curate accessible course content, organize cohesive and coherent materials tied to overarching learning objectives, and apply rigorous assessment standards to identify existing resources for classroom use.
Faculty Fellows commit to:
Through the Fellowship program, faculty learn to to:
Faculty Fellows make the resources they create openly available for other faculty to adopt, and we are happy to be able to offer modest funding to each faculty member the first time they teach a ZTC section of a course using a Fellow's materials.
If you are interested in becoming a Fellow or adopting a Fellow's materials, please reach out to Digital Scholarship Librarian Leila Walker at leila.walker@qc.cuny.edu.
What are Open Educational Resources?Nearly forty percent of CUNY students come from households with annual incomes of less than $20,000. For many of our students, the cost of textbooks can be a steep barrier to academic success. Students often choose not to register for courses that require expensive textbooks, or fail courses simply because they cannot afford the materials. These patterns can lead to increased enrollment time and reduced rates of degree completion.
One way to reduce textbook costs is to offer zero-textbook-cost classes that use Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are teaching, learning, and research tools released under licenses permitting free use/modification while ensuring authors retain copyright to their work. They do more than just save students money: they provide a way for teachers to tailor educational materials to the specific needs of their class, and to ensure that the materials they use stay up-to-date with the current research.
The “open” in “Open Educational Resources” describes educational content that is either in the public domain or licensed to allow users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. David Wiley, the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, explains what these “5Rs of open content” mean:
While many OERs are freely available online, to make the most of these materials teachers need to think creatively about all the ways that the “5R” rights open up new pedagogical possibilities.
Before our seminar, please read two short articles about the purpose and possibility of open educational resources:
If you get really excited (or need an excuse to procrastinate on another project), Stacy Katz has assembled an extensive bibliography of CUNY OER publications.
Before our next meeting, take a critical look at your existing syllabus. Evaluate the syllabus and identify:
Next, begin annotating this document. Identify places on the syllabus where you can:
Bring your annotated syllabus to our second meeting.
Image credit: "Sunflower" by Unsplash user Max Andrey.
In general, copyright law serves two major purposes:
Copyright protects expressions of ideas, including literary and artistic works; translations, adaptations, arrangements of music and alterations of literary and artistic works; and collections of literary and artistic works.
Copyright applies the moment a creative work is expressed — as soon as you write down the lines of a poem or draw a cartoon mouse. No registration is required. Unless the author or creator specifies otherwise, all rights are reserved and no reproduction, distribution, or derivative use are allowed without permission from rights holder.
Works in the public domain are not protected by copyright laws. Anyone is free to reprint, reuse, redistribute, republish, and re-purpose these works freely.
There are three main categories of public domain works:
For an extremely thorough guide to copyright and fair use, see Cornell University's guide to Copyright & Fair Use.
The Creative Commons were developed to give authors and creators a way to deliberately permit certain uses of their works within copyright law. Watch this video to better understand what the Creative Commons licenses do and why they exist:
Creative Commons licenses are identified by four terms that can be used in combination to indicate how others can use your work:
Attribution (BY)
All CC licenses require that others who use your work in any way must give you credit the way you request, but not in a way that suggests you endorse them or their use. If they want to use your work without giving you credit or for endorsement purposes, they must get your permission first.
Noncommercial (NC)
You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and (unless you have chosen No Derivatives) modify and use your work for any purpose other than commercially unless they get your permission first.
No Derivatives (ND)
You let others copy, distribute, display and perform only original copies of your work. If they want to modify your work, they must get your permission first.
Share Alike (SA)
You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify your work, as long as they distribute any modified work on the same terms. If they want to distribute modified works under other terms, they must get your permission first.
Sometimes you can use copyrighted works in an educational context without violating copyright law. If you are concerned about whether fair use applies, the best thing to do is to bring your materials to the Course Reserves office. The librarians in that office will evaluate copyright restrictions and, when possible, make the materials available to your students while observing copyright law.
The four factors to consider in determining what constitutes fair use are:
For an overview of fair use, please watch “Fair Use in 2 Mins,” a video guide from April Hathcock, the Director of Scholarly Communications & Information Policy at NYU and former intellectual property and antitrust lawyer.
Image credit: "Goldfinch" by Unsplash user Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.
What is access?In order for your course to be effective, it must be accessible to your students. In a physical space, the classic example of accessible or universal design would be sidewalk curb cuts, which are intended to make sidewalks accessible for people in wheelchairs, but which unintentionally make life easier for all of us when we pull a wheeled suitcase or push a stroller. Similarly, in a digital space, providing closed captioning on videos or providing transcripts for podcasts makes that content accessible for people with hearing impairment, but it also makes the content easier to access for those of us who work in open offices, or have thin walls, or just prefer reading to listening.
The OER movement aims to make educational resources more accessible to all students by removing significant financial barriers to success. But as we create new digital resources, we must make sure that we don’t introduce or replicate other barriers to access. This means designing for people who experience digital spaces in a variety of ways, including people with physical and cognitive disabilities.
But it also means considerations beyond ability and disability. Privacy concerns, for example, might discourage students from participating in public blogs; students from marginalized or vulnerable populations might be particularly vulnerable to harassment and bias online as well. Part of making a digital extension of your classroom accessible is making sure that it is safe for all your students.
Before our seminar, please read:
And familiarize yourself with best practices for accessibility:
Image credit: "Pram Ramp in Mawson Lakes, South Australia" by Wikimedia user Michael3.
So as educators we need to ask, how do we want our students to use the course materials we make available to them? And what platforms or formats will best support that use?
I’ve outlined a few tools and platforms with pedagogical applications below. Please take a moment to peruse them. As you do so, consider how you would like your students to engage with your course materials and what platform or format would best support that engagement. Most of these can be used in combination, so, for example, if you want to assign a textbook in Manifold and use Blackboard to keep track of student grades, or if you want to assign readings on a WordPress site and annotate them using Hypothesis, you can!
The CUNY Manifold platform allows registered users to create digital texts that can be collaboratively annotated. The platform supports multimedia content such as videos and images. Some faculty have used this platform to create textbooks like How to Code in Python 3; others have created digital editions of literature in the public domain, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and still others have used the platform to publish edited collections of student work, like Structuring Equality. This platform is a good option if:
WordPress installations like the CUNY Academic Commons allow faculty to create course sites with a high degree of freedom in the design, organization, and privacy. This means that you have a lot of control over how students engage with course materials, which can be great if you have a clear sense of what you want, but can be overwhelming (to you and your students!) if you don’t. WordPress is a good option if:
Every class at Queens College has an associated site in Brightspace. Experts can manipulate the look and feel of the site to support student blogs, organize materials and assignments, and keep track of grading. Because these sites require a log in, they allow you to include some copyrighted content, such as content available under fair use or content licensed by the Queens College Libraries. This also means that student privacy is protected. However, this platform does not support collaborative public writing projects or annotations. Brightspace is a good option if:
OpenEd CUNY is a collection of resources created and curated by faculty across the CUNY campuses. These materials can be remixed, revised, associated with particular classes, downloaded as PDFs, printed, and more. Create media-rich materials using a standard template that makes it easy for other faculty members to benefit from your work. Materials include texts as well as “overviews, pedagogical supporting text, and instructions for both students and other users of the resource,” and, in Module creation, they can include sequenced tasks for step-by-step learning. OpenEd CUNY might be a good option if:
Pressbooks
Pressbooks is a dynamic, web-based authoring tool that allows users to create, adapt, and adopt openly-licensed content on the fly. Pressbooks authors can create interactive content and assessments by using H5P and encourage annotations with Hypothes.is, both seamlessly integrated into the platform. CUNY’s installation of Pressbooks is supported the CUNY Office of Library Services and by OER Representatives on each campus. You might use Pressbooks if:
Hypothesis
Hypothesis isn’t a platform, but it’s a Chrome extension that can help you enhance student engagement with materials. One of the challenges of designing a course using open educational resources is that the materials can seem disjointed; some require a relatively high level of fluency or familiarity with disciplinary jargon. Hypothesis can help you model effective reading habits and keep track of where students are getting stuck. Once the extension is installed, it can be used in Chrome to collaboratively annotate anything on the Internet. You can even form private groups so that students can see each other’s annotations without worrying that their notes are visible to the public. You might ask your students to use Hypothesis if:
More!
These are just a few options; a few more are available in the Digital Scholarship Guide. I encourage you to play around with your options, and if you have any questions, please let me know!
Image credit: "close-up photo of assorted mini tools" by Unsplash user Nathan Dumlao.
