And check out this excellent introduction to CC, helpfully provided by KCeL: https://kcel.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cc/

The Kingsborough Library, with the support of the Provost, KCTL and KCeL, will be providing Lumen Learning tools to faculty who would like to deploy OERs in their courses. As a pilot, we will be providing access to Lumen’s Candela courseware to participating faculty who want to deploy an OER in the Fall 2017 semester. Candela allows faculty to adopt, remix, create and share open course content. Helpfully, Lumen also provides direct support for faculty who would like assistance getting their OER content up and running. Here’s an introduction to what Lumen does, taken from their website: At Lumen Learning, our purpose is to help higher education institutions improve affordability, access and student…

To move ahead the work begun by the KCTL OER FIG, Provost Russell has recommended founding a Kingsborough OER advisory board to guide the development of OERs on our campus. This advisory board will have the opportunity to shape the implementation of OERs at Kingsborough. We already have a number of interested participants from departments across campus; if you would also like to take part, please contact the FIG organizers, Profs. Reabeka King and Mark Eaton. The advisory board will be holding its first meeting on November 30th, from 1:50 – 2:50pm in room L-805 (Please note updated location!). Initially, we will be working toward building momentum on campus for…

Beginning in the Spring term, CUNYFirst will have the option to list courses as having “Zero Textbook Cost”. This was approved by the CUNY Registrar last week. This is a major step forward for OERs at CUNY! Professors using OERs now have a way to promote their hard work developing these texts, and students will have a way to select classes that they can afford. Moreover, this will help promote further development of OERs: as students realize that zero cost textbooks are an option, they are probably going to push for more OER classes. This is an exciting time for OERs at CUNY!

A few weeks ago, your KCTL Open Education Resources FIG organizers spoke with Prof. Shawna Brandle of the Political Science department about her use of OERs in her classes. Prof. Brandle created an open access sourcebook for her Introduction to American Government class, and made it available as an iBook and as a .pdf. This text was required reading for her class. According to Shawna, the book took “about a month of evening work” to put together using iBooks Author, a free tool specifically for creating iBooks , pdfs, and ePubs. If you are interested in trying out iBooks Author, Prof. Brandle says that you can get up to speed…

OERs give us the opportunity to adapt the work of others. This saves time and can broaden our teaching horizons. In the spirit of OER, we wanted to use OER content for our reading list for the KCTL OER group. Thankfully, other CUNY libraries have already done some great work about OERs. Steven Ovadia at LaGuarida Community College has put together a course on OERs for faculty, and shared it on Github. Steven’s course is on point for our KCTL group. Also, its format is easily editable, and the CC-BY-SA license is open and flexible. So I modified it: I forked the Github repository; I fixed some broken links; I…

Librarians can help faculty work with OERs on campus. Kingsborough librarians can consult with faculty from other departments, offering advice on aspects of OERs such as repositories, peer review and licensing. However, in addition to qualitative assessments, the Kingsborough librarians wanted to offer some quantitative evidence to back our recommendations of specific OER repositories. The result was the following project: We decided to create a Python script that would analyze existing LibGuides about OERs. LibGuides are a means by which librarians share resources on specific topics. Many LibGuides about OERs already exist at colleges around the world. We wanted to harness the collective wisdom of these LibGuides by aggregating their…