City Tech’s Open Educational Resources Fellowship

Cailean Cooney

City Tech started its Open Educational Resources (O.E.R.) professional development program in 2015, modeled on a couple of programs that emerged in the early 2010s: one at Temple University, and particularly the program at UMass Amherst, designed to fund faculty converting  course materials to zero cost O.E.R.

When the O.E.R. Fellowship program launched, open educational resources were not widely known about or implemented across the College’s teaching and learning landscape, with some notable exceptions, including Mathematics faculty authorship of open textbooks. The launch of the O.E.R. Fellowship program provided a well-timed learning opportunity for faculty to take on the task of converting their course materials from proprietary textbooks to zero cost / O.E.R. By the end of the Fellowship, faculty create an open and public course website to share their course materials, hosted on the OpenLab – “an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech.”

Participants in the Fellowship, some for the first time, become experienced with O.E.R. as they acquire knowledge to support their engagement with open course materials. This includes defining open educational resources, distinguishing open educational materials from free materials, interpreting and selecting Creative Commons licenses, finding, evaluating and selecting O.E.R., and implementing accessibility best practices (Cooney, 2016).

A major goal of the program is to expand faculty knowledge about the open / public space that they are entering and the kinds of skills and considerations to be mindful of in order to operate in it effectively and with agency. This goal translates directly into the learning objectives of the O.E.R. Fellowship, shared above, and is meant to seed expertise among faculty about O.E.R. and adjacent domains. This has been an important and distinguishing factor of our programming: teaching faculty concepts and practices to implement and work into their own process.

The framing of the Fellowship learning objectives go beyond the zero-cost course material as end product and is a small but impactful way of pushing against the incomplete and reductive framing of O.E.R. as an affordability issue, which can relegate it to an afterthought, or completely disconnected from teaching and learning. The O.E.R. Fellowship is itself demanding and in order for it to be meaningful, faculty need to feel a real sense of ownership around this work, and that is why it focuses on the project as a learning community, composed of faculty across the college, rather than inundating a captive audience with ideology and P.R. talking points. One challenge of conducting any professional development program, especially in the age of public education austerity, is to build community and a sense of collective commitment to the demands of the program.

With that in mind, we wanted to share how we’ve been trying to build community in the O.E.R. Fellowship during COVID-19.

References

City Tech OpenLab. About the OpenLab. https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/about/ 

Cooney, C. (2016). O.E.R. Fellowship Seminars Syllabus. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_oers/2/ 

Cailean Cooney (she/her) is Assistant Professor and O.E.R. Librarian at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where she coordinates the Library’s Open Educational Resources (O.E.R.) initiative. She has published about the impact of O.E.R. on the student experience in Open Praxis and the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Her interests include foregrounding student-centered approaches and equitable design principles in faculty professional development programs.