Did you know that students at four-year public universities spend an average of $1,250 per year on textbooks? For CUNY students, this can be an impossible expense. Using open educational resources (OERs) and/or zero-cost course materials (ZTC) where possible (e.g., library resources or materials that faculty have created) makes education accessible and help student achievement.
CCNY Libraries has been holding workshops for faculty on developing open educational resources for their courses. This is part of a larger initiative at CUNY which aims to provide quality, publicly available content for students in order to “reduce the cost of their education and smooth their path to academic success” in the words of CCNY Provost Tony Liss.
These workshops support the use and creation of openly accessible resources and have allowed participating faculty to transition their courses to a model that uses only freely available learning material at no cost to students. Funding for these workshops has been provided by the OER Scale Up Initiative, a grant from New York State launched in 2017.
The workshops have allowed faculty to work with CCNY Libraries Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) department, CCNY librarians, and OER fellows. This team has helped instructors understand more about OER, search for openly accessible material, learn about copyright and fair use, and build their courses and assignments using specific platforms and software. Over 250 courses at CCNY have been transitioned to an OER/ZTC (zero textbook cost) model with the help of this team of experts. These courses benefit from a wide range of material which can include videos, primary source materials, textbooks, and more.
Curious to see what this might look like? Check out these courses developed by CCNY faculty using Open Educational Resources:
Gender and Sexuality in Caribbean and Latin American History by Professor Daisy Domínguez
Music 10100 - Introduction to Music by Professor Stephen Jablonsky
More workshops will be held later this semester and beyond, so please keep an eye on broadcast emails from CCNY Libraries. Feel free to reach out to OER@ccny.cuny.edu with any questions and see CCNY Libraries’ OER page for more info.
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