Open Educational Resources (OER) have taken off at CUNY and the Commons has developed the platform to support instructors’ teaching and use of OER.
Groups and Sites on the Commons can be tagged as “OER” meaning that site or group uses, compiles, or functions as an OER. View a short list of OER projects on the Commons in our OER Showcase or search the Groups or Sites Directory to find more OER on the Commons.
To see other OER’s created by and for CUNY, check out CUNY OpenEd, a comprehensive guide to all the OER used and shared across CUNY.
As part of CUNY’s OER Initiative, each CUNY campus has an OER Rep to support faculty using OER. If you are CUNY faculty member interested in using OER, contact your Campus OER Rep for more information.
For more information about OER at CUNY, check out the CUNY OER Intiative Report and the publication Building Open Infrastructure at CUNY (on CUNY Manifold).
Open Pedagogy
Open platforms like the CUNY Academic Commons connect seamlessly to OER and digital tools that can provide opportunities to deepen student engagement through annotation, sharing, and remixing (a method of editing, reusing, or re-purposing course materials or assignments).
Courses that use open teaching methods often incorporate some combination of student blog posts, open educational materials, public-facing writing or projects, experiential learning, and/or multi-modal composition. See here for more information about Open Courses & Open Pedagogy on the CUNY Academic Commons.
Manifold & Open Texts
In addition to developing and maintaining the CUNY Academic Commons, the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives is collaborating with the University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding to develop Manifold, an intuitive, open, collaborative platform for scholarly publishing that is also a powerful tool for teaching. Manifold allows instructors to create dynamic course materials by publishing custom, annotatable editions of public domain texts and open educational resources (OER). Instructors can embed additional notes, files, images, videos and interactive content into the text to create a multimedia reading experience.
