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Uncategorized — Comments Off on Summer Series on Fall Teaching: Open Educational Resources (OER)
15
Aug 16

Summer Series on Fall Teaching: Open Educational Resources (OER)

Each Monday until the beginning of the school year, the HLBLL blog will feature a Summer Series on Fall Teaching (SSOFT), with brief writeups and links to resources in the CUNY world and beyond to help you prepare for the upcoming semester of teaching in CUNY.

This week, SSOFT features Open Educational Resources (OER).

Past SSOFT features:
The Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center
Free course sites and Social Paper: OpenCUNY, The CUNY Academic Commons, and Social Paper
Resource Repositories: CUNY Syllabus Project, CUNY Academic Works

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are, according to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.” Many OER are licensed under the Creative Commons, which allows users to access, copy, and share the work (non-commercially, very often), and also may allow for some adaptation or remixing of the material.

Whether you’re looking for ways to tweak your syllabus, provide enriching one-day lessons, or jump start lesson planning of your own, OER could prove useful in your teaching this fall. CUNY Central’s Library Services maintains a guide on OER and also an OA/OER Toolkit. Included in the OER guide is a non-comprehensive list of OER that you could employ in your classrooms. Click through on the links below for some OER guide highlights for you to explore in greater depth.

OER Libraries and Databases

OER Commons

 

OER Commons: A library of digital OER with advanced search tools to find the appropriate resources by course subject, course level, resource type, etc. Follow OER Commons on Twitter.

 

 

CCCOERCommunity College Consortium for Open Educational Resources: CCCOER maintains a list of OER, with corresponding links to content. One CCCOER goal is to enlist community college professors to refine and expand the existing resources so that current and future community college students have free access to quality materials rather than having to pay for expensive proprietary textbooks and workbooks. Follow CCCOER on Twitter.

 

MERLOTMultimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT II): MERLOT is a project of the California State University system and its partners to provide high-quality OER to educators and students and to allow educators to freely share resources they have developed on their own. Follow MERLOT on Twitter.

A search for Spanish language resources on MERLOT returns nearly 500 different results for materials that can be freely used in classrooms now, including:

  • An oral recording and paleographic transcription of all five+ hours of the Cantar de mio Cid, intending to allow students of the epic poem to appreciate its oralidad.
  • “Mi vida loca”: A 22-episode BBC mystery web series set in Madrid to teach Spanish vocabulary and grammar to beginners.
  • Trabalenguas: A site with 145 tongue twisters for pronunciation and vocabulary practice.

 

 

Uncategorized — Comments Off on Summer Series on Fall Teaching (SSOFT): Resource Repositories
25
Jul 16

Summer Series on Fall Teaching (SSOFT): Resource Repositories

Each Monday from now until the beginning of the school year, the HLBLL blog will feature a Summer Series on Fall Teaching (SSOFT), with brief writeups and links to resources in the CUNY world and beyond to help you prepare for the upcoming semester of teaching in CUNY.

This week, SSOFT features two resource repositories at CUNY: CUNY Academic Works and the CUNY Syllabus project.

CUNY Academic Works

Screen Shot 2016-07-24 at 2.02.12 PMCUNY Academic Works is an open-access institutional repository for the CUNY community, coordinated by the Office of Library Services at CUNY Central. CUNY faculty, professional staff, and graduate students can upload their open-access materials, including articles, conference presentations, theses and dissertations, and materials prepared for teaching courses. Committed to the ideas of a public university and open access, anyone with an internet connection can download materials from CUNY Academic Works for free.

The repository is growing, with nearly 12,000 CUNY-wide submissions since its recent launch, and over 2,000 submissions from the Graduate Center community alone. Downloads of CUNY Academic Works materials total over a quarter of a million! Among other benefits, adding your work to the repository will result in greater visibility for your scholarship on search engines such as Google.

Browse CUNY Academic Works by CUNY school or by discipline, or use the search tool to narrow your search.  Prepare for the 2016-2017 year in your Spanish language classroom with “The politics of normativity and globalization: which Spanish in the classroom?” by Professor José del Valle. The article appeared in the Modern Language Journal in 2014, and is now also housed on CUNY Academic Works.

Follow Academic Works on Twitter for updates.

CUNY Syllabus Project

The CUNY Syllabus Project (CSP) is a syllabus repository collecting syllabi from all CUNY instructors across all campuses and disciplines. The project was launched this year by Laura Kane, a Phd Candidate in Philosophy, and Andrew McKinney, a PhD candidate in Sociology. The goal of the project, according to its organizers, is to “become a robust resource providing a way to search, compare, and visualize syllabi across institutions, disciplines, and departments at the City University of New York.” This goal can only be accomplished, however, through a critical mass of syllabus contributions from CUNY’s instructors.

The CUNY Syllabus Project is currently in its collection phase and is seeking contributors to upload current or past syllabi. Contributors can also allow for their syllabus to be publicly available for searches on the site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Follow the CSP on Twitter for updates.

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