Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

Attention, CUNY Faculty: Get Paid to Learn about Open Educational Resources (OER)!

"Global Open Educational Resources Logo" by Jonathasmello - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
“Global Open Educational Resources Logo” by Jonathasmello – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

CUNY’s Office of Library Services just announced an exciting (and paid!) opportunity for full-time and part-time faculty to learn about open educational resources (OER), which include open access textbooks and other freely available, online instructional materials:

CUNY’s Office of Library Services is sponsoring an online workshop designed to provide an overview of Open Education Resources (OER) for CUNY faculty looking to integrate OER into their classes.

Open content and open access textbooks are instructional resources that can be used, reused, often remixed and customized under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others while ensuring authors retain copyright to their work. (Read more here.)

OER present an alternative to the high cost of textbooks for students. OER are freely available and distributable course materials. For this workshop the focus will be on OER materials that are:

  • Available at no cost to faculty and to students
  • Can be modified by faculty
  • Can be redistributed by faculty with changes to the original OER work.

Faculty can choose pre-existing materials, just as they do with traditional textbooks, but they can reconfigure content as they see fit, pulling elements of one text into elements of a different one, even rewriting sections, if the faculty member wishes.

OER are not just textbook material. They can include anything from entire course shells, to syllabi, to assignments, to presentations.

For students, OER means less money spent on course materials and course materials that are specifically tailored to the work of their professor. Instead of forcing a textbook into a pedagogical structure, the textbook and course materials are driven by individual pedagogy.

This class is made up of four modules, plus a final project. Each module is made up of readings, videos and discussions. Each workshop section will be comprised of no more than 20 participants in order to foster in intimate forum to share OER work and get feedback from colleagues and the facilitator. The goal is to finish the workshop with a better understanding of OER and also to come away with some work that can be immediately integrated into classes.

The workshops will be entirely on line and last for a two week period requiring approximately 10 hours of work. The activities and assignments can be completed on a flexible schedule during the time period. To be eligible for this workshop, applicants must be teaching faculty scheduled to teach in the spring 2015 semester. Department chair and Chief Academic Officer sign-off will be required. Faculty successfully completing the workshop will receive compensation of 10 hours at the non-teaching adjunct rate for participation.

Click here for registration.

Questions? Please contact: Ann Fiddler at [email protected] or 646-664-8060.

Posted on

They’re Here! Dissertations & Theses Now in Academic Works

(Déjà vu? This post is a very slight reworking of a post I wrote yesterday for the Graduate Center Library blog.)

sellie cover
Title page for the thesis of Alycia Sellie (GC librarian and OA@CUNY blogger). Academic Works auto-generates title pages for all PDFs in the repository.

They’re here! All Graduate Center dissertations and theses from 2014 (thus far) are now in Graduate Center Academic Works, the Graduate Center’s new open access institutional repository. (Institutional repositories for the other CUNY campuses are coming soon!)

Some of the dissertations and theses are open access (i.e., freely available) now, and the others will become open access at the end of the author’s chosen embargo period (generally six months, one year, or two years).

Browse this incredible batch of intellectual output by department or en masse. Or scan a few of these works (all of them already open access), which I’ve cherry-picked for having especially engaging, curiosity-sparking titles:

The dissertations and theses of October graduates will appear in Academic Works soon. And moving forward, all theses and dissertations will appear shortly after each graduation.

Added benefit of going open access: If a thesis or dissertation (or any other work) is open access in Academic Works, the author will receive monthly readership reports detailing how often the work has been downloaded, what search terms led readers to the work, etc. (And I’ve already heard from 2014 graduates who are surprised and delighted by how much their dissertation or thesis has been downloaded!) So, not only does going open access help you find a broader audience and make a greater impact — it also helps you see and track that impact!

Posted on

Scholarly Communications Librarian @ CUNY: More Time to Apply!

Application Deadline Extended: There’s still time to apply to be CUNY’s first Scholarly Communications Librarian! The deadline is now Monday, July 28, 2014.

Summary of Posting:

The City University of New York (CUNY) seeks a Scholarly Communications Librarian to provide leadership for scholarly communication and digitization initiatives. The Scholarly Communications Librarian will be responsible for developing and managing CUNY’s new Digital Commons institutional repository of scholarly and creative works, publications, and digital objects by members of the CUNY community.

The Scholarly Communications Librarian will be hired at the Higher Education Associate rank and work for CUNY’s central Office of Library Services (OLS), not a specific campus. S/he will report to the University Director of Library Systems.

The Scholarly Communications Librarian will:

  • Organize, oversee, and assess the processes (e.g., faculty outreach, copyright compliance) related to the repository’s maintenance and development.
  • Collaborate with the vendor and CUNY-wide libraries to create, develop, and optimize publishing/ingest workflows.
  • Establish/codify best practices in repository management, including reporting and optimizing metadata management.
  • Establish communication procedures and platforms for campuses to use to work with contributing authors (faculty, staff, students, alumni).
  • Lead education and outreach to faculty and provide guidance to library colleagues and others on issues relevant to the dynamic scholarly publishing landscape, including author rights, open access (OA) publishing, and alternative publishing trends related to tenure and promotion.
  • Serve as OLS’s primary resource on copyright compliance, fair use, and other copyright issues pertinent to CUNY library collections and services.
  • Provide supervision for planning and implementing digitization projects in alignment with the library’s mission and strategic goals.
  • Collaborate with liaison librarians to provide tools and educational opportunities in the adoption of best practices in scholarly communication relevant to CUNY’s academic mission.

This position is represented by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) and covered by its contract. For more information, see http://psc-cuny.org/our-contracts.

Full Job Posting / How to Apply:

For the full job description, including minimum and preferred qualifications, application instructions, and a link to begin an application, visit http://tinyurl.com/CUNYScholComm

(The full address for the link is: https://home.cunyfirst.cuny.edu/psp/cnyepprd/
GUEST/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL?Page=HRS_CE_JOB_DTL&Action=A&
JobOpeningId=10829&SiteId=1&PostingSeq=1. Alternatively, go to http://www.cuny.edu, click “Employment” then “Search Job Postings” and then “More Options to Search For CUNY Jobs,” and search for Job Opening ID 10829.)