Why OER at CUNY?
High textbook costs and CUNY’s mission for accessibility and affordability have increasingly meant more interest in bringing Open Education Resources (OER) to CUNY. For some faculty, OER might be an unfamiliar concept while for others who are already committed to adopting or creating OER, there is still a desire for a more systematic approach to designing a course using OER.

Workshop Structure and Format
It’s never easy to find the right date or time for faculty professional development. As a result, the office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology at CUNY SPS and the office of Online Education at Lehman College with the support of Lehman Library offered a two-week fully online, asynchronous workshop on OER in June 2017.

Rather than simply providing information to faculty on the what, how and why of OER, a faculty development approach focuses on a process of exploring, evaluating and selecting resources, as faculty share ideas and observations with their peers and are provided with targeted feedback from the workshop facilitators.

How it Got Started?
In summer 2017, 42 CUNY faculty successfully completed this deep dive into OER, completing the workshop with a plan in hand to adopt OER to support student learning and with a map for how to embark on course revision.

What to Do Next?
On this site, you can find more information about the workshop content and structure, download the workshop to be imported into Blackboard or Course Sites, download guides for implementation and more.

What are the Licensing Conditions?
This workshop is adapted from materials from Leonard Lief Library Research Guide on Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Leonard Lief Library OER Fellowship Blackboard Course and from content created by Susan Ko of CUNY School of Professional Studies, Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology, and Olena Zhadko of Lehman College, Office of Online Education. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY NC SA) 

Updated August 1, 2019