By Elvis Bakaitis, Adjunct Reference Librarian at The Graduate Center and New York City College of Technology (CityTech), both part of the City University of New York
Over the past two years, the City University of New York (CUNY) was offered generous state funding towards the development of Open Educational Resources (OER). The funding was primarily intended to target high-enrollment courses, with the aim of lowering the overall materials costs for CUNY students, and as a form of immediate financial relief. Administered through the Office of Library Services (OLS), each campus submitted a funding proposal for individualized programming based on the existing infrastructure at their institution.
OER at The Graduate Center
As the primary doctoral-granting institution of CUNY, The Graduate Center serves a unique population – approximately 4000 students, enrolled in PhD and Masters programs. A high percentage of Graduate Center students are also employed as adjuncts across the twenty-five CUNY campuses, teaching upwards of 7600 courses per year, and affecting as many as 150,000 CUNY undergraduates.
With these considerations in mind, the Graduate Center Library applied the grant funding to create an Open Pedagogy Fellowship. The Fellowship was specifically designed to address the underlying financial need of CUNY undergraduates, through a process of converting courses to OER or Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC). The program offered a conceptually well-rounded training on how to curate and license open content, as well as the deeper complexities of finding educational materials in a commercialized landscape.
There were fourteen participants in the Fellowship, doctoral students from a variety of disciplines. The Fellowship was structured around two primary components: required attendance at the OER Bootcamp, an intensive workshop held over four days in mid-January 2019; and Breaking Open: An Open Pedagogy Symposium, on Friday, May 3rd. The Fellows received direct and ongoing support from GC Librarians and Open Education Technologists, participated in an online forum, and developed individual course sites on the CUNY Academic Commons.
The OER Bootcamp offered a robust introduction to issues of open content, beginning with a presentation by Chief Librarian Polly Thistlethwaite about her activism during the AIDS crisis in New York City. Thistlethwaite described the urgent need for publicly accessible research about HIV/AIDS medications, in contrast to a political climate of silence and hostility – and the activist work that ultimately led to wider dissemination of government-funded medical research. Each of the four days was split into a working session and featured presentations from GC library faculty or visiting speakers. Jean Amaral, Open Knowledge Librarian at Borough of Manhattan Community College, shared examples of open pedagogy, while Emily Drabinski, Critical Pedagogy librarian, questioned the sources of knowledge production through a collective brainstorm session.
Breaking Open: An Open Pedagogy Symposium was designed through the leadership and vision of Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, Head of Reference at the Graduate Center Library. The event built upon the Bootcamp’s critical framework, expanding the conversation into the realm of content creation, and labor practices surrounding OER. It was anchored by a dynamic Keynote address from Clelia Rodriguez, who spoke to her own experiences as a woman of color in academia, and the relationships between different forms of knowledge. Wanett Clyde, Collections Librarian at the New York City College of Technology, referenced the overlap between her professional life and research interests, and the impact of limited access to source material.
OER and Diverse Representation
One of the major questions surrounding OER is sustainability. The state funding represents a meaningful, multi-year investment in the labor involved to develop, curate, and host open content. And as the CUNY Year One Report observes, significant monetary savings are evident across the University.
At the same time, the funding works on a limited timeframe, narrowing its scope: it has mostly been used to convert individual courses, and not, typically, towards the development of original, openly-licensed works. The required labor is not recognized within the tenure and promotion process and is, therefore, an unsustainable “add-on” to other non-adjunct / full-time faculty priorities.
Questions of labor are essential to consider, especially in regards to content creation. Who is being compensated to create/curate OER, and how is this reflected in their choices? As Quill West observes, referencing work by Francesca Carpenter, W. Preston Davis, and Daphnie Sicre, “OERs are not inherently diverse, nor are they necessarily inclusive.” While OER offers the opportunity to revise, and newly conceptualize educational content, it would be just as easy to unintentionally invoke traditional power dynamics, and re-invent a familiar wheel.
At the Graduate Center Library, we sought to shift the funding towards Graduate Center students, as an intentional nod towards their status as adjunct faculty. Lacking the benefits and research leave of full-time faculty, adjuncts may not have the time to contribute to OER. On the national level, there is an increase in diverse representation among adjuncts, but not necessarily full-time faculty. The instability of these gains (particularly for women, who make up the majority of adjunct faculty nationwide) points to deeper issues in academia, but is also reflected within OER work, which at CUNY is frequently supplemented by a reliance on adjunct labor, and individuals in lower-paid, college assistant positions.
Fundamentally, OER has significant potential to reshape the course construction and define a new value system across higher education. But without continued focus on these underlying issues – representation, labor, and content – the movement towards open is likely to replicate many of the inequalities that we are already familiar with, and that characterize a wide variety of educational content today.