Abstracts for breakout sessions held between 10:30 am to 11:30 am. There are both 50-minute and 25-minute presentations, so please check the time and schedule carefully. For complete schedule information for the symposium, click here. Location maps for the rooms are provided here.
10:30 am — 25 minute presentation E-266 Patrick McGee (Queens College)
LILAC: Networking disparate resources: An Information Literacy Fellow with CUNY’s Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee (LILAC) was tasked to create an online repository for a large collection of teaching materials. Upon further research into CUNY’s digital ecosystem, it was clearly not such a simple task: the dialectical play of defunct websites and new publishing platforms introduced levels of epistemic complexity and called for a more intensive overhaul. By structuring the collection as a network of open access tools, LILAC has now made their materials accessible from many points of entry and provided forums for a greater sense of scholarly community among its members. In this breakout session we will explore ways to network open access materials, discussing the implications for information literacy and open pedagogy.
11:00 am — 25 minute presentation E-242 William Blick (Queensborough Community College)
Success and Challenges: Building an OER Collection Using the Institutional Repository: Open Educational Resources have now become recognized as vital efforts to reduce student educational costs. As a librarian and liaison to the CUNY Academic Works institutional repository, I have had the privilege to see the earliest efforts of faculty implementing zero-cost textbooks in their classes and housing the works in Academic Works. Under the guidance of CUNY Scholarly Communications librarian, Megan Wacha, I assisted faculty in the earliest phases of their OER efforts. In this presentation, I will describe and demonstrate some of the earliest efforts of OERs at Queensborough, and the successes and challenges we have had.
10:30 am — 25 minute presentation E-265 Sean Patrick Palmer (LaGuardia Community College)
Online Resources for Speech Classes: This suite of websites includes a website about spoken American English, an annotated database of poems and short speeches for student to record, and assignments to encourage students to imporve there expressiveness and build confidence in speaking.
11:00 am — 25 minutes presentation E-265 Derek Stadler (LaGuardia Community College)
FinLit for Life: In 2022, the LaGuardia Library received a $50,000 Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Foundation Library Grant, which supports public and academic library efforts to meet financial and/or investor education needs at the community college level. We developed an OER textbook called FinLit for Life: Teaching Financial Literacy at a Community College, which targets LaGuardia students, particularly those who come from households that make under $30,000 a year or those whose heritage language is not English. The breakout session will:
Provide an overview of FinLit for Life.
Highlight how it reaches students through a critical financial literacy lens.
Give examples of how to incorporate FinLit for Life into a class.
10:30 am — 50 minute presentation E-258 Jean Amaral, Lisa Haas, Craig Nelson, Rachel Nevins, and Linda Pamphil (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
Moving from OER to Open Pedagogy with Zines, Wikipedia Editing, Podcasting, and More!: What comes after redesigning our courses with OER? Open Pedagogy! The Open Knowledge program at BMCC is part of the movement promoting open pedagogy and student engagement in open knowledge creation. The program aims to engage students as co-creators of knowledge and elevate their voices. Join us to learn about how we work with Federal Work Study students, as well as faculty creating open pedagogy assignments, in four open project areas:
Online public writing
BMCC Reads: An online reading and writing community where students contribute book reviews and reading reflections.
Wikipedia Editing: Don’t cite it, write it! facilitates students contributing to the largest OER and most-read reference work on the planet.
Alternative media
Audio/Podcasting: Students and faculty create audio recordings and podcasts as part of classes and as independent projects.Zines: Kinda like a DIY magazine or booklet, this creative alternative writing assignment supports universal design for learning principles, with students combining visual and textual materials in a shareable zine
We’ll briefly describe open pedagogy and each of the projects, including examples of authentic, non-disposable assignments. Then we’ll turn it over to you to hear your ideas and thoughts. The goal: to inspire you to start experimenting with open pedagogy, one small assignment at a time!
10:30 am — 50 minute presentation E-234 Johannes Familton, Susan Licwinko, and Babul K. Saha (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
We can “Helpyourmath” at no extra cost for your education: Have you wanted to create an online platform using your materials and questions? Do you want to provide an online homework platform that is free for students? Then, Helpyourmath is a solution for you! Helpyourmath is an Open Educational Resource (OER) created by faculty members at BMCC. Helpyourmath provides a free online homework platform and mini-lectures so that anyone can import Helpyourmath into their math classes. The biggest benefit is that you get to customize your course(s) using your problems.
10:30 am — 25 minute presentation E-242 Ian McDermott (LaGuardia Community College)
How Should We Do OER? CUNY at a Crossroads: For seven years CUNY has received a $4 million grant from New York State each year to support OER work across the University. LaGuardia has benefited enormously from this grant, which has saved students millions of dollars and encouraged faculty to develop free and open teaching materials. Concurrently, decades of disinvestment in higher education have produced a near permanent state of fiscal austerity. As a result, we rely on grant funding to perform core duties. The grant does not fund permanent, tenure track positions. Rather, it pays stipends to full-time faculty and funds adjunct, contingent labor. This breakout session will address these contradictions and provide an opportunity to brainstorm alternatives.
