 I'm loving it! Welcome back to another session of Domains21. I'm Jim Groom and I have, I'm going back into the well, the CUNY well as they say, and I have a group of folks from the City University of New York Graduate Center here to talk about OER's infrastructure. We've talked with a few groups from CUNY, so it's been a compelling part of this conference, at least for us on Domains21. So welcome all, I'll let you introduce yourself and I will remove myself from the screen. Hi everyone, I'm Matt Gold, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the CUNY Grad Center and Director of the CUNY Academic Commons and Co-PEI of the Manifold Scholarship Project. Hi everyone, I'm Luke Walzer, I'm Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the Graduate Center and I teach in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program and the MA program in Digital Humanities and work with Matt on the CUNY Academic Commons as Director of Community Projects. Hi everybody, I'm Laurie Herson, I'm an open educational technologist in the Teaching and Learning Center. Hi everyone, I'm Robin Miller, I'm an open educational technologist in the GC Digital Initiatives. So thanks so much Jim for having us on the air here. You know we're really excited to talk about OER at CUNY. For those of you who don't know, the City University of New York is an incredibly large urban public university located in New York City. It has 25 campuses, it has an incredibly diverse student body and it has been supported in its creation of OER in recent years by the State of New York which has contributed funding that has allowed the Office of Library Services at CUNY led by Anne Fiddler and Andy McGinney. McGinney to foster a set of initiatives across the system that have really enabled us to promote not just open education but open platforms and I think one of the things that this group, Luke and Laurie, Robin and I and also our colleague Wendy Borellis who unfortunately couldn't make the session today have been working on is thinking about OER infrastructure and the particular role that CUNY can play in creating open platforms for teaching and learning and the publishing of scholarship and we've done that with the CUNY Academic Commons which is going on 10 years of existence, has almost 30,000 members and Manifold which is a newer digital publishing project and which is being used across CUNY to publish a range of open educational resources. I've been really lucky to collaborate with Laurie and Robin and Luke on this project which has really enabled us to support open education across the entire system. So I can say a bit about our strategy in establishing this the structure for supporting open infrastructure throughout CUNY. When investments came in from New York State into CUNY and SUNY starting about three years ago to facilitate the development of open educational resources they I think smartly prioritized the transition of high cost textbook courses, textbook driven courses into zero textbook cost courses. They're really attempting to save undergraduate students money on the books that they would have to read to participate in their coursework. We at that point didn't know how long these investments would would last within CUNY and because of how the Graduate Center is positioned on a consortium model where our faculty come from all of the CUNY campuses and our students teach at the majority of the CUNY campuses we are very much connected and a connecting node for the entire university. We had the privilege and the opportunity to think about infrastructure at the level of the system and what would be necessary to sustain the investments that were coming in from New York State over time right and not necessarily to be drawn into a semester by semester representation of the impact that we're having but really to build something that we think could foster more critical approaches to teaching and learning with technology that are at the heart of the open movement and we're able to build upon platforms manifold and the commons that were already in existence and really deepen their embeddedness within the infrastructure that people use for teaching learning and scholarship throughout the university. So to do this we were able to to bring on open educational technologists to support these projects full time. Lori Herson joined us in 2017 in this role. Krisha Michael who's now a professor at Hostos Community College joined us and when Krisha left Robin joined us. So we've been able to work on a variety of initiatives to support faculty and graduate students who are building out their work on these platforms and then to take what we learn from supporting them back into the development of those platforms right. Their open source platforms we oversee their development and there's lots to learn from how they're used within the field. So maybe Lori you can tell us a little bit about what that looks like on the commons and how it's evolved over the past few years. Sure so I'm going to share my screen and walk you through a couple pages on the commons that can kind of show the development of how the commons has increasingly supported open teaching over time. Okay so the CUNY academic commons was primarily used developed to support teaching and collaboration across CUNY but in the spring of 2017, wrong one, a lot of tabs here, in the spring of 2017 we hosted a faculty fellows program to explore different ways that the commons might support undergraduate teaching and from that over time the commons releases new versions and new updates twice a year in the spring and in the fall and so in after hosting several faculty fellowship programs spring of 2017 we also hope hosted OER faculty fellowship program in the spring of 2018 and from that came several you know developments on the commons that we increased the platform to better support teaching and learning. So we redeveloped the sort of creation portal which walked commons users through how to develop a group or a site on the commons and this better supported teaching because previously folks were not hosting undergraduate courses on the commons but once we kind of clarified how you start creating on the commons you can have a group, you can have a site, you can have a connected group site and these are the sorts of things that help us host courses and so once folks were hosting courses on the commons we developed the courses directory which is a big move for the commons because it really showcases and surfaces all the courses that are running on the commons and when you look through the courses directory you can search by campus and semester and disciplinary cluster and that has developed over time at first the courses directory was sort of just a listing of courses and now we're able to better filter helping faculty and students find their courses on the commons and you can kind of scroll through and see that over time the commons has now hosted over 1200 courses across CUNY in all sorts of disciplinary clusters, humanities, the sciences, social sciences and they're all filterable through here and with the development of like OER use throughout the commons we also were trying to support courses that are primarily using open educational resources to to to run the class and so we I'm just going to show you a course right now that was developed out of Brooklyn College as part of their OER fellowship program this language loss culture politics and the self and so on these on these sites there if it's a completely open site anyone can go see the sorts of open educational resources that are being used the sort of units and the way that the site has been developed and you can click into all these places and see see the the content that's being shared there and there's also a lot of student work happening on the commons I want to just jump over to another completely public course which was a linguistic landscapes course that was run at LaGuardia Community College where students actually did an oral history of a neighborhood so they developed they you know explored neighborhoods across New York City this was pre-pandemic but it was a completely open course where they produced audio and oral histories they produced gifs and all this work was shared publicly through this common site so this is kind of an example we have this language loss course which is using open materials which is one way to do open on the commons to doing completely open and public projects on the on the site and so courses can be you know there's various privacy settings so a course could have a private site so you might be running an open course on this open platform but you only want it available to your students and then you can go you can even have a public site so there's different levels of privacy that you can have on the commons as well yeah so there's courses running on the commons but I also want to point out a couple other things where the commons is not just hosting courses it's also actually hosting open educational resources themselves so one project that we did at the TLC where I work with Luke is we are releasing all of our workshop content openly we've categorized them and each and each of these workshops is available here and then they can be used by anyone across CUNY anyone doing any sort of faculty development in higher ed and you can click in and see these workshops and this is happening throughout CUNY this is another example of an OER kind of resource that's hosted on the commons where folks from LaGuardia are collecting natural science OERs and sharing them with folks at LaGuardia but also across across CUNY for anyone who might be trying to teach an open science course so in that way the commons is kind of hosting both open courses and hosting you know OERs themselves and one thing I would just you know add on to what Laurie has said is that you really see the kind of the power of building openly at CUNY in those examples that you know we have so many different campuses you know from graduate and professional schools to senior colleges to community colleges located in you know all the five boroughs of New York City and when you have faculty working with students not just to teach online but to use the course as a way to generate open resources that becomes really powerful because and then the commons as the content accretes over time as more and more people build openly we've really been able to develop a feeling and a sense of community in the space which is why we've been able to keep the project going for so long. So Manifold is another fantastic project that we have at CUNY where we provide a digital publishing platform for anyone within the CUNY community to build OER to use it as a way to bring public domain texts into the classroom which helps students by bringing textbook costs down to nothing as part of our zero textbook cost initiative within CUNY. We've had a lot of amazing projects that have come out especially over the past year and with the pandemic as instructors have kind of struggled with student engagement and working everything over Zoom but we've had just some really great things that have been happening on the Manifold platform from this one great books that has been done at Queensborough Community College which is a brand new project fabulous bringing in public domain texts that can be used across the CUNY system. We also have had a lot of coursework projects that are put on to Manifold so we have instructors that working with their students building content that is you know openly available for anyone to read and to use within their courses or just to enjoy themselves if they'd like to read it. There's a few of these here you can see I wake up counting this is a guide for teaching and learning and humanities and social sciences. Part of the Haystack group produced this along with the Graduate Center and the Futures Initiative. One of the things about Manifold I'll say because I got to see it in another talk that you can see here at Domains 21 but the fact points to Robin the way in which you all have built another infrastructural piece to build community around particular texts and it's the idea of the text as the building block of community whereas Lori you did a brilliant job showing the whole idea of you know what we've known the CUNY Commons for as websites as a space that is open educational resources I mean that's been that case since the mid 90s and like you're balancing these by not just saying oh websites or die but introducing new applications as well and have a diversified infrastructure for your community to use is a really like unique and I think part of that uniqueness Matt you kind of alluded to earlier was saying that you guys have been playing the long game you know and I mean that like this has been going on CUNY for a long time and that is starting to pay off in some powerful ways as we're starting to say and Matt maybe that's a point of contention so I'll let you all talk about that but that's how I'm seeing it from the outside is that fair well I mean I think so many of us are at CUNY and believe in CUNY because of its mission of serving you know like the children of the whole people of the city of New York it's kind of got this idea of openness and equity that is built into the institution or you know which is not to say it's not problematic because there are multiple ways in which is problematic but you know in all of its kind of messiness in all of its diversity CUNY is sort of open in its in its kind of instantiation from you know open admissions in the in the past to just this this mission of serving the entire city and so you know we've been able luckily I think in some ways kind of in the margins to build out these spaces and I think it's a credit to you know the teams that we have the people that we have people like Luke who really you know see this as a kind of strategic move to build out this this infrastructure over time and the amazing thing at CUNY is that you know first of all we prioritize community like a lot of our projects begin with a really rich and well thought out articulation of what community is and how we can connect to people and then once you start opening these platforms and encouraging students and faculty to use it I mean they just they they are so much amazing content being created because the the the people the the students and the faculty do do such incredible work here I like to add to that by you know just emphasizing the point of of community that emerges around these platforms and the tagline for the commons and it has been since it was launched is what will you build and I think it's really important at this conference and in other spaces for us to to critically consider the ends that we seek with openness right it's great to save students money on textbooks that's a really valuable pursuit right it's great to have open access publications and to let knowledge be free these are positive things we but we feel also that a lot is asked of openness and I'd like to thank one of my students Joe Thompson who's an open educational resources librarian at CUNY and adjunct who wrote a blog post about this just this week in our ITP course that I'll that I'll share I think it just does a wonderful a wonderful job of of raising this question right because we are very much in a conflict over the future of the university system we've been everyone knows we've been fighting austerity for a generation and and this team and the work that we do in our our comrades at the open lab at city tech and at BMCC and in other spaces throughout CUNY very much see open infrastructure as the space from which we can think and organize our response to proprietary incursions on the work that we do in the university and we're frankly we can fight for the soul of the university in the future of the university it allows us to exert more influence over the the labor dynamics and the intellectual property dynamics of the work that happens and not to cede those questions to the administrative spaces that are disconnected from the the core ethos of the university which which Matt laid out so we very much see this open infrastructure as a necessary precondition for the work that that we want to do right openness is a valuable end in and of itself but openness itself is not going to transform the university and and these platforms have allowed us to bring new populations new disciplines new learners and thinkers into that conversation with us and it is a long game it takes a long time for you to build community and for that community to develop trust and ways of ways of working and you know i'm just really appreciative of of Matt's leadership on this at the commons since you know late almost 15 years he's been working on this stuff from from the perspective of the commons and it takes that kind of persistence commitment and vision to break us out of the semester by semester cycles of reporting an impact demonstration that you know open investments often require to justify themselves and ramp big fan thank you all very much thank you