Chapter 1: What is OER?

This section will explain what OER stands for and the requirements according to the CUNY grant.

What Is OER?

As you may know, OER stands for Open Educational Resources. This essentially means that your course does not require students to purchase a textbook, and all the course readings and assignments are made available online, following Fair Use copyright considerations.

An official definition for OER according to CCNY’s OER staff:

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others.”

UNESCO, adapted by Creative Commons

Does OER = ZTC?

ZTC and OER courses are not the same. Zero Textbook Cost (ZERO/ZTC) simply means that there is no textbook cost for your particular course. ZTC classes are at least 3 undergraduate credits and the designation is focused on required texts, not where the readings come from and how they are licensed, or the additional course materials. In fact, a course may even be considered ZTC if the purchase price for required supplies, homework system or online platform are less than $40.

All instructors are encouraged to consider how they can lower student costs and move towards ZTC designation. If your course requires no textbook, and/or you provide a course pack to your students, your course can be listed as ZTC on CUNYFirst and Akademos. However, this does not mean the course is OER.

OER courses incur no student cost, as the materials are free and easily accessible to not only your students, but also others outside of your course. This means that using Blackboard as your course hosting platform is not “OER-friendly”, as only students who are registered and cleared by the Bursar are able to access your site. You may use Blackboard in conjunction with your course, for uploading assignments, plagiarism checks, and grading, but the course materials need to be posted on a site that provides access to students outside of the course as well. In addition, OER course texts must have Creative Commons (CC) licenses. OER includes and goes far beyond textbooks.

One exception regarding textbooks: if teaching a FIQWS course, it is fine for a class to reference readings in required texts from the topic course, but students should not be assigned separate readings from this text in your course.

Again, OER courses, including content materials and assignments, must be available online to a wide audience, and have the proper copyright permissions for the use, adaptation, revision, and distribution by others of the uploaded/accessible materials. (See copyright/fair use section for more details.)

CUNY/CCNY OER Grant

CCNY received a grant in for 2017-18 school year as part of $8M New York State split between SUNY and CUNY schools to increase OER offerings with the goal of saving students from purchasing textbooks.

According to a 2018 article from Inside Higher Ed, “…SUNY and CUNY, respectively, re-engineered roughly 3,700 and 1,500 course sections that served roughly 56,000 and 40,000 students. By using OER instead of traditional textbooks, officials say, students in the sections were estimated to have saved about $12 million.” (Inside Higher Ed.com "New York Doubles Down...")

This large success led to both schools receiving an additional $8M for the 2018-19 academic year. Currently, reports from last year’s funding and a new application are under review. CCNY expects to receive continued funding in the new application cycle. Part of this is due to the interest expressed by English instructors in converting or adopting courses, attending workshops, and participating in projects that study implementation or provide additional instructional material for these newly designed courses.

English instructors who participate in the OER workshops (generally offered once or twice a semester) receive $300 for attending a 5 hour workshop led by CCNY’s OER staff.

Develop and convert a course to OER, and you will receive an additional $700 once the course has been officially adopted by CCNY. Keep in mind that this amount may change depending on the grant funding, which is updated on an annual basis and expected to decline in the future, as the need for new OER courses will decline.

Adopt a previously created and approved OER course from another instructor, you will receive $300 for completing the training and $200 for adopting a course.

Attending OER workshop $300

Developing course adopted by CCNY $700¹

Adopting previously created course $200

For more information contact:

English Department:

Tom Peele, Ph.D.Associate Professor/Director First Year Writing Program

E: tpeele@ccny.cuny.edu O: 212-650-6328

CCNY OER:

Vivian ChanIT Assistant, Information Technology

Ching-Jung Chen, Ph.D.Associate Professor/Digital Scholarship Librarian

E: oer@ccny.cuny.edu O: 212-650-7607

Steps To Create Or Adopt An OER Course

1. Complete required CCNY OER training workshop (CCNY OER)

2. Decide whether you will convert or adopt a course

3. Confirm interest in converting or adopting a course (CCNY OER)

a.Complete paperwork (PA-F7) and time sheets for stipend

4. Inform Director First Year Writing Program and/or Dept. Chairperson and Dir. of Administration (ENG)

5. Create account and upload CC licensed content to CUNY Academic Works

6. Develop course on CUNY Academic Commons or other free platform

a.Blackboard cannot be sole platform

b.Privacy settings should still protect students’ rights

7. Send course link and CC licensed content to OER team

8. Ensure that CUNYFirst indicates course as ZTC/OER

9. Update Akademos or other textbook ordering site and select “Adoptions not Required/Course uses OER/Zero-cost materials”

a.This step should be completed as soon as possible to assist students during registration, within two (2) weeks of the call for book orders

10. If you miss the deadline, retroactively code course (ENG)