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Open Education at the College of Staten Island

This post originally appeared on the College of Staten Island Library Newsletter and was written by Asst Professor & Instruction Librarian / OER Liaison Anne Hays

We are very excited to announce our campus’s role in the CUNY OER initiative. During the 2017-18 academic year, the College of Staten Island plans to convert 13 courses with 53 sections into zero cost classes using Open Educational Resources. This semester, the library has adopted open educational resources (OER) for all of its sections of LIB102, a credit-bearing course that teaches students research skills using the library. And next semester, courses in Biology, Economics, and ESL English will follow suit. We hope that this large coordinated effort to create and sustain zero cost classes for our students is merely the beginning of a larger campaign to transform the way our students experience college.

But let’s take a step back for a minute and talk about OER. “Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes” (Creative Commons). Textbooks are often prohibitively expensive for students—students may have to make the tough choice between spending hundreds of dollars on books for a single course, or attempting to learn without the book. The CSI Library purchases textbooks for a two-hour reserve checkout, making those readings technically free, but admittedly students cannot make notes in these copies, nor can they read them from home. An OER textbook is one that its author has published under an open license, which allows users to access the book for free (digitally), and allows educators to revise, retain, remix, reuse, and redistribute the work for free. OER imagines a world where high quality educational materials are free for students, libraries, and professors, removing that expense as a barrier to learning. And indeed, “Studies show that 93% of students who use OER do as well or better than those using traditional materials, since they have easy access to the content starting day one of the course” (SPARC).

Continue reading “Open Education at the College of Staten Island”

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Open Access Hulk: Best Interview Subject Ever!

The Open Access Hulk smashes paywalls the world over!

I’ve been thinking for a while (years, actually) about how complex open access outreach is — what sells one audience (say, faculty) on open access sometimes leaves another audience (say, students, or administrators) completely cold. I realized early that I needed to adjust my messaging for different audiences, and I’ve made many adjustments — some hits, some misses — over the years.

I recently wrote a column about the challenges of open access outreach, featuring snippets of an interview with the greatest (or at least most SMASHING) open access advocate of all time: the Open Access Hulk (@openaccesshulk on Twitter). The column hasn’t appeared yet (fingers crossed the editors don’t decide it’s too goofy, too CAPS LOCK’d to publish!), but the full Twitter interview is now archived on Storify. (On Twitter too, of course, but it can be difficult to follow a long exchange on Twitter itself.)

The Open Access Hulk is not our most syntactically sophisticated colleague, but he’s very informed, very perceptive, and very wise, and he had incisive, Continue reading “Open Access Hulk: Best Interview Subject Ever!”

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Consequences of Textbook markets moving to Access Codes (from LibraryBuzz)

access-deniedOriginally published at Library Buzz by Cailean Cooley

Student PIRGs – a powerful collective student advocacy body – has taken a prominent role in criticizing textbook publishers’ rising profit margins amid growing concern over college affordability. Its newest report focuses on textbook publishers’ shift to access codes as a strategy to maintain profit margins despite the emergence of free alternatives like open educational resources.

Here’s the full report:

Access Denied: The New Face of the Textbook Monopoly

“Access codes create a direct link between the ability to pay and the ability to get good grades.” 

More reports from Student PIRGs:

Covering the Cost – investigating the real impact of high textbook prices on today’s college students (2016)
Open Textbooks: The Billion Dollar Solution – alternative textbook model could save students a billion dollars (2015)

Source: Consequences of Textbook markets moving to Access Codes – LibraryBuzz