Worth the Time: Exploring the Faculty Experience of OER Initiatives

Introduction

Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives have proliferated across the United States to encourage faculty to teach with OER, which are “teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities—retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the resources” (Hewlett Foundation 2020). OER initiatives often take place at a region, state, system, or institution level1 and include goals related to “reducing the cost of learning materials, enabling faculty to customize the curriculum, and increasing educational equity and access for students” (Spilovoy, Seaman, and Ralph 2020, 14). Initiatives may include professional development and training opportunities (on campus, within the university system, and/or at regional or national conferences), stipends for faculty developing or adopting OER, course releases for working on OER, or other incentives. OER initiatives are the primary mechanisms driving faculty adoption of OER at colleges and universities throughout the United States. However, despite the importance of these efforts, few studies examine the choice by faculty to participate in OER initiatives, nor their experiences regarding participation in an OER initiative. In this article, we discuss the history of a particular OER initiative, as well as the results of qualitative research through in-depth interviews on the experiences of faculty teaching with OER through this initiative, highlighting the support they found valuable and how the ways OER have affected their teaching.

Literature Review

The success of OER initiatives is frequently assessed by the number of courses converted to OER and the total amount of money saved by students, yet cost is just one aspect of OER. In order to more fully capture the entire picture and contribute to the efficacy studies on OER, an interdisciplinary research group developed the COUP (cost, outcomes, usage, perceptions) framework as a broader approach to studying such programs. “Perceptions” in the COUP framework refers to how faculty and students think and feel about the OER they use (Open Education Group 2020). The question of faculty perception has been explored through a number of institutional studies, as well as national studies in the United States. Bayview Analytics (formerly Babson Survey Research Group) conducts biannual national surveys regarding US faculty awareness and perceptions of OER documenting growing awareness and acceptance in recent years (Bayview Analytics 2020). Belikov and Bodily (2016) conducted a coding analysis of free-response questions of the 2014 Bayview Analytics survey. The most common faculty responses to the barriers to teaching with OER included insufficient information, difficulty finding materials, and a lack of time to evaluate resources. Motivations included general positive perceptions of OER, the cost benefits for students, comparable quality to commercial resources, and pedagogical benefits provided by the materials’ flexibility.

Pitt (2015) conducted surveys of teachers using OpenStax, a popular provider of introductory-level OER, as did Jung, Bauer, and Heaps (2017). These surveys included educators across institutions to understand perceptions of OpenStax textbooks. Both studies found that benefits of OER extended beyond financial benefits to pedagogical benefits that made it easier for faculty to teach and for students to learn. The questions did not include any mention of initiatives that may have facilitated their adoption, as the studies are concerned with the educators’ perceptions of the specific OER, leaving open the question of how faculty came to use them.

Martin and Kimmons (2020) conducted qualitative research by interviewing faculty at a large, nationally ranked, private university in Utah who responded to a survey about OER and expressed interest in learning more. Their participants were either new to or aware of OER and answered questions about their experiences with seeking out new content, particularly open content. Similar to the quantitative studies around faculty adoption of OER, they found that faculty barriers to OER adoption include quality considerations, misunderstandings of copyright, technical challenges, and concerns regarding whether OER are sustainable due to the time and funding needed to create and maintain resources. Yet, the faculty were motivated by the opportunities that OER presents to eliminate the cost of course materials for students as well as improve pedagogy.

Local contexts are important considerations in studies of OER. Cronin’s (2017) study of university instructors in Ireland explored when, why, and how they choose to employ open educational practices (OEP), conceptualizing OER as one form of OEP. Participants represented a spectrum of users of OEP, from those who use little or none to those who are completely open educational practitioners. In this study, Cronin shows that the use of OEP is contextual and also continually negotiated. In their examination of barriers to OER use in higher education in Tanzania, Mtebe and Raisano (2014) found the main barriers to OER use included lack of access to computers, limited internet bandwidth, and limited skills for OER creation, while, contrary to other studies in the region, lack of interest and lack of time were rated as smaller barriers to OER use. The differences in the intensity of these particular barriers show the importance of investigating a local context, as barriers to OER adoption can vary.

While myriad studies explore faculty perceptions of OER, they do not interrogate the faculty experience of participating in an OER initiative. The goal of our research was to identify the most common reasons why CUNY faculty at senior colleges participated in the OER initiative, which parts of the initiative provided motivation to teach with OER, and what barriers still exist. This project fills a research gap by focusing specifically on the role of OER initiatives in overcoming barriers to the adoption of open materials, and by anchoring that study in a diverse but particular context, conducting interviews with faculty who are already teaching with OER at four-year colleges across a large, public university with many diverse campuses. This context is particularly important as New York State actively funds an OER initiative that provides money for institutional support as well as a financial incentive for teaching with OER, both of which are explored in this study. The implications are relevant to the OER initiatives throughout the United States, particularly in terms of identifying forms of support that faculty value in an OER initiative.

Method

The aim of this study was to examine the particular reasons why CUNY faculty at senior colleges participated in the OER initiative. In order to achieve that aim, the project was designed as a qualitative study employing in-depth interviews with faculty who teach with OER. Participating instructional faculty were recruited through suggestions by library faculty and other educational staff who were most aware of which faculty teach with OER.

Funded by a grant obtained by the researchers, faculty were offered $75 Amazon gift cards for their participation in the interview. The inclusion criteria specified that participants must be full-time faculty who taught with OER in at least one course. One of the authors verified at the beginning of each interview which materials they taught with, confirming the materials were either in the public domain or had Creative Commons licenses with the permissions to retain, revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute. Faculty teaching primarily with Zero Textbook Cost materials, such as library-licensed eBooks or copyrighted websites were not considered eligible for an interview, as those materials do not have the permissions afforded with OER.

Using a semi-structured interview protocol, the first author interviewed all participants, either face-to-face or via Zoom, between October and December 2019 (see Appendix A for in-depth interview guide). Each interview lasted between a half hour and an hour and were recorded and transcribed using the service Transcribe.me. After transcription, the first author reviewed each interview transcript to ensure any errors were addressed (e.g. “ten-year” instead of “tenure”). The transcripts were then coded using inductive coding methods in order to derive themes from the data. Interviews were coded in an iterative manner and previous transcripts were coded until new themes were no longer identified. When and how one reaches those levels of saturation varies between study designs. The idea of data saturation in studies is helpful; however, it does not provide any pragmatic guidelines for when data saturation has been reached (Guest et al. 2006). Guest et al. noted that data saturation may be attained by as few as six interviews depending on the sample size of the population. Participants were no longer recruited once saturation of codes was reached. The second author reviewed the codes and transcripts to identify any additional themes. Inter-rater agreement was used to manage the trustworthiness of the coding process.

Results

Faculty participants spanned the disciplines, with four faculty from Social Science departments, and three each from Arts & Humanities and Math & Science, as shown in Table 1. Six of the faculty interviewed were tenure-track, while four had already achieved tenure. Three of the tenured faculty were Associate Professors and one was a full Professor. The participants were from six different CUNY senior colleges. Despite the varied campuses, disciplines, and statuses of the ten professors interviewed, several common themes emerged: shared motivations such as the cost burden to students of traditionally published textbooks, the importance of discussions with their department chairs, librarians, and Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) staff, and appreciation of financial support from the CUNY OER Initiative, even though most respondents agreed that the funding was nice but insufficient to incentivize their participation.

Defining OER

The researchers confirmed that all of the faculty interviewed teach with OER by asking which materials they use in their classes. In the initial questions, the faculty were asked to define OER. Three faculty explicitly mentioned Creative Commons licenses and one other included the ability to revise materials, one referred to open source, and one commented on public domain materials. Seven faculty mentioned zero-cost materials, which makes sense within the context of the initiative, as faculty teach with a mix of OER and zero-cost materials. Free, online, zero-cost, open-access, or library-subscribed resources often came up when faculty were describing OER.

Student focus

The cost burden on students was mentioned in every interview as a major motivation for faculty to begin to explore OER. As Interviewee 3 put it:

I mean number one is probably the cost, right? I mean I’m not sold that all undergraduates, especially in CUNY, can readily afford all of their textbooks. So I’ve seen students have this art of being able to get by in class without doing the reading. And they see purchasing the textbooks and doing the reading as a suggestion rather than a requirement. So making everything freely available to them I feel is beneficial because it reinforces the importance of doing the reading and removes any barriers, real or perceived, or any barriers to them actually doing the readings. So that’s always been my number one motivation.

The faculty expressed a genuine passion for their discipline and desire for students to engage with the assigned materials. As Interviewee 5 explained:

I think every teacher would have this feeling that you feel sad for the students that don’t engage. There are never that many of them, but of course, they take up your time and you intentionally think about them. They loom a little larger in your sense of things sometimes than [they] probably should. But even if it’s 5 in a class of 30 or whatever, you’re like, “Who are you? You’ve missed out. This stuff is so interesting. It will change your life. It’s amazing.” And it feels sad to me to think that students just kind of—some students, not many, some students—they will … kind of just not engage. So I like the idea that maybe OER will shrink that and find a way to reach the imaginations and fire the hearts of most students.

Seven faculty expressed that students were more engaged because the faculty had made their courses more customized, more interactive, or more relevant to students’ lives. Interviewee 1 also commented that it improved their expertise: “Going in and creating a syllabus with OER materials, I read a lot. I read a lot more, and so I became more of an expert in my field rather than simply going with what the textbook publishers have provided me.”

Department chair support

While faculty enjoy academic freedom and can select materials for their courses, department chair approval was required to participate in the OER initiative. Therefore, the department chair was able to influence whether or not the faculty member could receive the benefits, both in-kind support and financial, associated with the OER initiative. Nine of ten interviewees discussed their chair’s support for their OER work, with four having very supportive chairs and five having somewhat supportive chairs.

Support from a chair was just getting the go-ahead to teach with OER, such as this comment “You want to do this? Yes, okay. Just do it.” and, “My chair is happy I did the workshop and thought it was neat and great, but more just [as] professional development.” While the support from chairs was generally minimal, for pre-tenure faculty to spend time working on OER, some level of support was essential. Pre-tenure faculty simply are in a difficult position to push back against departmental opposition. Of all interviewees, only the tenured Full Professor mentioned that their chair opposed their participation in the OER initiative. They were only able to go through the program and adopt OER against their department chair’s wishes because of their status as a tenured full professor. Other chairs may have opposed participation by untenured faculty, however, but given our study design focusing on initiative participants, we did not encounter this.

Librarian/Center for Teaching and Learning support

Nine of the ten interviewees made reference to the discussions or training they had with OER librarians or members of their campus CTL, which facilitated their conversion to using OER. Several of the interviewees mentioned relying on librarians for help in where to find OERs. As Interviewee 4 explained, “She’s kind of the one library staff member that serves as the liaison with the faculty to kind of help with the steps of converting a syllabus over to an online platform. Whenever we run into walls finding sources, she’s the person that we’re told to kind of liaison with.” All of the interviewees were extremely positive about the support they received from their librarians. Interviewee 3 commented, “I have really liked the OER workshops that the library runs because they’re interesting. But also, any opportunity where we can get together to do something for faculty development, I think it’s good for us, both as a department and as a college.” Some respondents, like Interviewee 1, even used the resource of a dedicated OER librarian to help them totally reshape their teaching:

Our OER librarian … worked with me to redesign my course and provided me resources, and also to redesign an assignment that I’m using an open pedagogy approach to make it renewable. So I’m actually having my students create OER and inviting them to post it in an OER repository as part of a course.

Faculty mentioned that librarians and instructional designers provided help in individual consultations and through workshops on copyright and Creative Commons licenses, finding OER, platforms for OER, and open pedagogy.

Financial incentive

All but one of the interviewees mentioned that the financial compensation provided by the CUNY OER Initiative was a motivating factor for OER adoption. Financial compensation served more as a proxy of institutional interest and appreciation than as a sufficient incentive on its own. Financial compensation would seem to be an appreciated, but on its own, insufficient incentive, as many interviewees echoed the sentiments of Interviewee 5 when they said, “There was financial incentives in terms of funding [for] people develop[ing] these courses, and that was helpful. But I think if you look on a per-hour basis, it’s nowhere near the amount of time it took to actually do it.” After all, as Interviewee 9 observed about their colleagues, if they were looking for extra money, OER conversions are not the only way to find it: “Maybe I’d rather teach an overload class and get some money rather than actually spend the time doing OER conversion.” The financial incentive alone was not enough for our faculty interviewees to consider teaching with OER. However, the funding did signify that the initiative was important to the institution, as Interviewee 3 expressed:

I do appreciate that CUNY’s embracing this. I think it’s important. So in that sense it’s important to me. But number one is it’s a means for my own classroom needs, right? So it’s like I wasn’t morally offended prior to knowing that CUNY had this university-wide effort to go over to OER. So in that sense it’s not overly important, but I like to know that they’re committed to it.

The faculty expressed that students were their overriding reason for teaching with OER, but knowing there was support from the institution also helped.

Faculty time

Half of the interview subjects mentioned demands on time, and those who discussed time in relation to OER had a lot to say. Interviewees talked about the amount of time converting to OER takes. “Time! [laughter]. Time. It took a lot of time to go out and find resources, to find quality resources that really got at the points that I wanted to make with my classes, the concepts that I wanted them to understand,” commented Interviewee 1. Others emphasized how it is particularly difficult for pre-tenure and adjunct faculty to find the time, especially when it is unclear whether department chairs or administrators will take OER work into consideration in reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions. As Interviewee 5 said:

I think my department appreciates that I do it, but I don’t know if it really—I wouldn’t see realistically its making a difference one way or another in terms of other things. It’s taken a lot of time that could’ve went to other resources. So I think you’re going to find faculty that are doing it who want to do it because there’s still not enough of an incentive structure to make people do it otherwise.

The time involved in teaching with OER also detracts from time spent on other duties, particularly publishing. Interviewee 5 continued, “It doesn’t atone for the paper or two I could’ve gotten out with the hours that went into this. And I think that’s where all faculty are; time is a limiting factor. So you have to figure out how you’re allocating it to those different areas.” While the financial incentive is symbolic of some level of institutional value, tenure and promotion demonstrates what the institution actually holds as paramount. Given these long-term concerns, the balance of time and workload for faculty is crucial for faculty seeking tenure and promotion.

The faculty interviewed teach with OER knowing that the time they spend on it does not contribute to what they need to achieve for tenure and promotion. As Interviewee 6 stated, “It’s a larger question than you and I can take up as to whether the priorities in an institution are correctly set for what is the most important, second important, third important for a promotion. I know what those priorities are and I’m directing my career based on that.” OER is valued, but as these interviews show, tenure and promotion guidelines do not include them, so OER cannot be as high a priority as their other responsibilities.

Community

OER was largely regarded as an experience between the instructor and the course. As Interviewee 4 remarked, “I mean it’s primarily a means to my class, right, but at the same time, I do appreciate that CUNY’s embracing this, right? I think it’s important.” Four faculty commented that they did feel that they were part of a campus or a CUNY-wide OER community, though only one felt that they were part of such a community beyond their local experiences. Even when faculty described themselves as OER advocates and had participated in events beyond their own campus, they did not see themselves as part of an OER community beyond CUNY. As Interviewee 7 commented, “I have gone to several summits and workshops and I have presented on different panels with OER. Tried to expand the voice of OER. But I don’t consider myself in the broader community of OER, which is kind of weird, but yeah.” The faculty interviewed considered OER as a means to teach their students and provide them access to the knowledge of their discipline, but this did not extend to a sense of joining a community of open educators.

Overall feelings about OER

Faculty continually asserted in the interview that participating in the OER initiative was “worthwhile” and were concerned that their comments about how it could be improved would be perceived as negative. One faculty member described OER as transformative and another commented, “OER is an entry into collaboration and adapting and adopting and remixing and sharing with others.” Interviewee 5 described the satisfaction of teaching with OER: “I think it has made my professional life better. … I think that [it’s] an interesting professional activity and a rewarding personal activity.” Interviewee 8 expressed, “If I can help my students to lower the cost of their education and to make them smile and feel less burdened, that’s really a gain to me. I find pleasure in that.” The joy that faculty expressed in helping their students through teaching with OER demonstrated their increased professional satisfaction from participating in the initiative.

Advice for faculty teaching with OER

All of the faculty interviewed expressed positive feelings about OER and how it benefits students. Interviewee 5 felt that “it’s worth doing in terms of getting the students involved, thinking and engaged, and benefiting the students.” Most faculty advised others to start small and pilot OER in one course. Much of the advice centered on remaining flexible, as Interviewee 1 remarked, “OER can change your thoughts about the materials you’re using in your course, even the kinds of materials you’re using.” They continued “Be very flexible. Be committed. You might get lucky and you might have a class [where] there’s a textbook already written that says exactly what you want it to say. But in more defined areas, you may not. So you need to be committed to finding resources that are valuable for you and your students.” Interviewee 7 compared it to writing a paper: “You write pieces of it and then you merge them together and then you re-edit.” Five of the faculty discussed their own desire to continue learning and to create OER or assign students to create openly licensed materials. These faculty considered creation of materials to be the answer when faculty are unable to find the right OER for their courses.

Discussion

These interviews provide insight into the experiences of faculty participating in the OER initiative at senior colleges within a large, urban university, and concur with the findings of Cronin (2017) that “use of OEP by educators is complex, personal, contextual, and continually negotiated” (28). Similarly to Belikov and Bodily (2016), the biggest factors in motivating faculty to overcome barriers and participate in the OER initiative were to save students money, improve pedagogy, and institutional support. The cost burden of textbooks for students was a highly motivating factor for faculty to make the switch to OER. Faculty expressed that students lacking access to materials was a major factor in students’ ability to succeed and this was, therefore, a reason for faculty to change course materials to OER. The desire for students to have free access to the materials and to resources they had curated was the overriding motivator for teaching with OER.

The faculty interviewed expressed that OER helped them achieve their teaching goals and improve student learning. However, their participation in the OER initiative and teaching with OER did not contribute as much to their curriculum vitae for tenure and promotion as scholarly publications would, despite the time it took. The pre-tenure or pre-promotion faculty we interviewed were confident that they knew what to do to achieve tenure and promotion and were able to also devote time to OER. Presumably, faculty who are less confident in their abilities to publish would not be able to dedicate the time necessary to exploring and teaching with OER. The symbolic value the institution placed on OER through the funding the initiative and providing stipends was not seen by participants as equivalent to the institution valuing OER in the tenure and promotion process. This was demonstrated by participants’ comments regarding their time being better spent on publishing research papers, or knowing which activities will help them achieve tenure. Including creation of OER and teaching with OER explicitly in guidelines for tenure and promotion would likely provide a greater incentive for faculty to teach with OER.

Institutional support also factored into the decision to participate in the OER initiative. While all of the faculty discussed the financial incentives to convert to OER, none of the faculty believed the stipend offered was sufficient motivation. Faculty acknowledged that the stipend was not as valuable as the extra time they had spent. They could have devoted time to other activities that would help them either achieve tenure, or other professional activities that were less time-consuming and also offered stipends. However, individual financial incentives were only one piece of the broader financial support offered to campuses through the CUNY OER. The institutional funding was critical for the OER initiative because it provided for the support of OER librarians and Centers for Teaching and Learning, which nine of the ten interviewees mentioned as essential for their teaching with OER. The value of OER training and professional development such as conferences and workshops was also discussed in six of the interviews, in the forms of training, workshops, and conference attendance. These activities were also funded by the CUNY OER initiative.

These faculty varied in their participation in OER professional development activities beyond CUNY. However, even those presenting and conducting research on OER at regional and national conferences did not feel part of an OER community. The benefit of an OER community would be to find networks for resources and ideas within and between disciplines. It could be that CUNY is enough of a hub for OER, with robust support from librarians and CTL staff, that faculty do not feel they need to extend beyond to a greater OER community.

Faculty expressed their happiness in teaching with OER. They developed greater expertise in their fields and found that it was worthwhile. Faculty planned to continue teaching with OER and to expand to teach with OER in their other classes, as well as to explore open pedagogy, a practice in which students are empowered as creators. Faculty expressed that teaching with OER was meaningful to them on a professional level, which translated to personal satisfaction with their teaching position.

Institutions that are contemplating the development of an OER program can take many lessons from the results shared here. While faculty appreciate payments for their OER work, it would likely be more effective for initiatives to focus on providing time to do the preparation work and push for explicit recognition for OER efforts in tenure and promotion processes. Institutions can allocate time through funding course releases instead of paying cash stipends, though course releases are often more costly than the stipends offered by existing OER programs. In CUNY, for example, stipends for converting courses to OER have been around $2500, while a course release requires a grant of at least $3900, with even more required if fringe benefits are included. And while funding is hard to come by, changing tenure and promotion requirements may be even more difficult, which creates a path-dependency problem: faculty who are seeking promotion and tenure get the message that OER work is not valued for promotion and tenure, and therefore do not pursue it, or pursue it on the side of their other “real” work, when if it was valued towards promotion and tenure, more instructors would be more comfortable allocating more time to OER work. Changing these requirements would change incentive structures for faculty, but the process won’t be easy or quick. It is, however, possible, as Annand and Jensen (2017) describe how Athabasca University, which teaches almost entirely online, now recognizes the development of teaching materials as scholarly activity, encouraging the production and use of OER by faculty members. Additionally, institutions wishing to promote OER may benefit from devoting resources (expertise, funding, and/or time) to providing OER training to department chairs. Department chairs hold significant influence over junior faculty, and taking time to make the case to department chairs can have several benefits: OER-informed chairs may be more effective at sharing existing OER in their departments, be more likely to encourage their faculty to get involved in OER, and may even be instrumental in changing departmental and campus culture to allow for the revision of tenure and promotion requirements to explicitly recognize OER work.

Limitations

This research specifically examines the experience of full-time faculty at CUNY senior colleges who teach with OER. The insights from this population are enlightening, but many types of instructors were excluded from this research. The population was limited to faculty at senior colleges because the frameworks for tenure and promotion differ between the community colleges and senior colleges, even within the same university system. Adjunct faculty were not interviewed as they typically do not have formal responsibility for the curriculum, nor do they have a tenure and promotion process. While CUNY lecturers can attain an equivalency to tenure, the experience differs from faculty seeking tenure and promotion, as their evaluation is based on teaching and does not require a research agenda. While they were not studied, the researchers suspect that financial incentives may have a bigger influence on adjunct faculty and lecturers, as they often do not have the same opportunities for additional funding and earn far less than full-time faculty. Librarians, CTL staff, and others supporting OER were not interviewed for this study and would likely provide crucial insight on their experiences of the challenges in supporting faculty in teaching with OER. Another population worthy of in-depth study includes faculty who taught with OER and have switched back to commercial textbooks, as those perspectives are not yet represented in the literature. These populations were excluded from this study but could illuminate many of the barriers and motivations in teaching with OER.

Conclusion

Faculty overwhelmingly stated that concern over the cost burden of textbooks for students and the related desire for students to have access to learning materials was the reason they teach with OER. While individual financial incentives to instructors were appreciated, they were not the overwhelming motivation for the switch to OER. The funding signified some level of institutional priority for OER, even though it was not recognized in tenure and promotion. Institutional incentives and recognition were seen as more desirable, though faculty we interviewed knew that OER was not yet part of these formal systems. The funding for OER that provided support for librarians, CTLs, and professional development created the support for them to learn about and find and teach with OER. Given the level of time and work involved for even those who are committed to teaching with OER, and the enormous benefits for students, continued funding for support, as well as institutional recognition through tenure and promotion, are essential for incentivizing other faculty to participate in OER initiatives.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) for support in developing this project. Kris Brancolini, Marie Kennedy, and the 2019 IRDL cohort provided tremendous support, in terms of research knowledge and community. IRDL is partially funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant RE-40-16-0120-16.

Additional thanks to the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program for funding the incentives, transcription, and software related to this research.

About the Authors

Stacy Katz is an Associate Professor and Open Resources Librarian-STEM Liaison at Lehman College, CUNY. She initiated, developed, and oversees the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative for the college. Stacy’s research to date has focused on OER, particularly how librarians develop and support OER initiatives, faculty professional development in OER, and student views on OER. Stacy was a 2018-2019 OER Research Fellow and 2019 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship Scholar. Stacy’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Open Praxis, Journal for Multicultural Education, and the New Review of Academic Librarianship.

Shawna M. Brandle is a Professor of Political Science at Kingsborough Community College and a member of the faculty of the Digital Humanities program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research areas include human rights, media coverage of human rights and refugee issues, and Open Educational Practices in higher education. In Fall 2021, Dr. Brandle was a Fulbright Scholar at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. She is the author of Television News and Human Rights in the US & UK: The Violations Will Not Be Televised (Routledge 2015).