Author: Open Services Committee

Allison Brown

Two examples of OER creation in Geneseo’s Math department are Gary Towsley’s Real Analysis and the creation of a Geneseo edition of a set of popular OER calculus texts by Doug Baldwin, George Reuter, Chris Leary, Gary Towsley, and Lisa Smith.
Towsley’s original motivations for creating his Real Analysis text were to provide definitions, theorems, and explanations to students “so that they would spend less effort in producing notes and more effort in listening and understanding.” He also noted that the same text he used as a student that was $4 at the time cost $180; he preferred to create a no cost option for his students.
Although it was a challenge to update it yearly, the text was improved by student’s suggestions of adding examples and clarifying proofs, and eventually by the creativity and care of the peer reviewer.
The calculus project differed slightly as the project started with an already published OER. Baldwin commented, “The major motivation was the woeful state of copyediting that the OER versions of the textbooks had received, and the slow pace of corrections by Openstax. A secondary motivation was the opportunity to make sure material was placed in books and ordered within them the way it is in our courses.” Faculty that use these texts in their courses pair them with WeBWorK, allowing the course to have no costs passed on to the students.
The major challenge of the calculus project was finding the time to dedicate to localizing the text, and as a result much of the work was done during the summer. However the result of a high quality, localized text that multiple sections of calculus have adopted so the students can access their materials at no cost.
These two local creations are just a couple examples of OER use in the mathematics department, where Geneseo has seen the highest rate of OER adoption over the past few years.

Teddy Gyamfi and Amanda Wentworth

Incorporating Open Educational Resources (OER) into classroom instruction allows students and faculty to search, publish, and share content to improve usability and fair opportunities. In its mission to promote OER and related open practices, the Open Services Committee (OSC) at SUNY Geneseo hosts several events throughout the academic year. 

Open events and services provided by the OSC include:

• Open Access Week, typically held mid- to late-October.
• Open Ed Week, typically held at the beginning of March.
• Faculty Lightning Talks where the OSC invites Geneseo instructors who have had both challenges and success with incorporating OER and Open Pedagogy into their courses for other faculty to learn from their experiences, and to provide inspiration.
• Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) streamlines the OER search by providing instructors with one central location from which to identify, discover, and access Open material they can incorporate into their courses.
• Webinars and blog posts that inform the Geneseo community about current Open practices and activity at Geneseo. You’ll find our posts on the Fraser Hall (previously Milne) Library blog.
• Instructional help from liaison librarians for finding open educational materials on the web and incorporating open materials onto a LibGuide for your course.
• And….. this OER Symposium! This event is typically held exclusively at Geneseo each May. Traditionally held in-person, due to the pandemic, we began the OER Symposium virtual newsletter last year. The goal of this newsletter is to keep you (and us!) connected with each other and the latest news and information on OER in lieu of a face-to-face meet up.

For more information on how to get in touch with us, visit https://www.geneseo.edu/library/oer-services, and to learn more about Open Education at Geneseo, check out our Open Educational Resources for Faculty LibGuide.

Access the text online here.

“I wrote this book to fill a perceived gap between basic texts in physical anthropology and advanced books that cover paleoanthropology and fossil hominins in great detail. I designed it with my 200-level Human Evolution course in mind. I wanted more than is available in an introductory text without overwhelming students with the jargon, complex anatomy, numerous fossil sites, etc. of an advanced text. I also tried to avoid the general tedium of textbooks. The book can also serve as a supplemental text (since it’s free!) for any course that covers aspects of human evolution, such as Introduction to Anthropology, Introduction to Physical Anthropology, Human Ecology, or Old World Prehistory,”

Inanimate Life, an open textbook considering non-animal organisms by George Briggs, will soon be released by Milne Open Textbooks. “This book is both traditional and non-traditional. Although the kinds of organisms this text studies is similar to most botany texts of the last hundred years, the approach to study is very different. This book is focused on organismal biology, not phylogeny/taxonomy. It considers most of the groups that were covered in traditional botany texts, that is, ‘EBA = everything but animals’: plants, fungi, bacteria/archaebacteria, and most of the organisms that used to be placed in the protist category. But the approach to these groups is ‘organismal’ and comparative. It attempts to define the organism level of life (not as easy as you might assume) and then comparatively examines four features that define organisms: their structure, their means of reproduction, their acquisition of matter and energy, and their interactions with conditions and with other organisms.”

Brandon West

Looking to grow professionally as an educator? Lumen Learning, a company focused on developing educators’ abilities to use Open Educational Resources, allows any SUNY faculty member to participate in their Lumen Circles Fellowship Program at no cost. This program is designed to help you develop effective instructional practices in an online environment with a cohort of like-minded individuals. Some of the upcoming fellowship themes include: active learning, belonging and inclusive teaching, evidence-based teaching, and online teaching foundations.

Fellowships include:

• 9-week community of practice with faculty from multiple institutions
• Weekly activities to explore, apply, and reflect on effective teaching practices (1-2 hours/week) 
• Build on your strengths and develop skills to expand your teaching repertory
• Set goals and track progress expanding your teaching practice profile 
• Work asynchronously in a virtual platform (website) to fit your own schedule 
• Earn a Lumen Circles Fellowship Certificate in Effective Teaching Practice

Apply to be a Lumen Circle Fellow at: https://info.lumenlearning.com/circles-suny 

Allison Brown and Jonathan Grunert

Creating your own open educational resource might sound intimidating, but did you know that you can get support at every step at Fraser Hall Library? The Library’s publishing services, part of the Collection Management department, handles many open access publications, but also supports faculty in the creation of OER. To get in touch with us about OER support, please fill out the simple form at https://www.geneseo.edu/library/oer-services.

Whether you are starting from scratch or retooling some classroom materials that you want to share with other colleges and universities, we can help from the beginning. We consult on the format, timeline, and tools used for the project and help make a project plan.

We offer support with finding media that is openly licensed, and citing that media properly. We can facilitate peer review—whether it be a formal blind peer review or a more informal and collaborative review. We can also have the manuscript proofread by qualified volunteers.

Formatting and preparing a text for final publication can be frustrating and time consuming. To help with this process we staff student publication assistants to take your project from the manuscript stage to the final layout. And lastly, we maintain stable websites where your work can be accessed by students for free, and, if appropriate, create a printed version that can be easily ordered online. 
KnightScholar, Geneseo’s institutional repository, can also support OER work. In addition to housing open textbooks, students, faculty, and staff can deposit their OER creations and adaptations into KnightScholar. Student work can be a useful means for creating open educational resources for future classes to use, and KnightScholar can become an open educational space.

Gillian Paku

In 2017 I adapted OER content for INTD 106: Conventions of College Writing from three Lumen Learning College Composition courses. I tailored these materials to fit Geneseo by selecting the pages that are most relevant to the fairly high skill level we encounter in our first-year writing course and by creating models and examples that reflect college-level courses across our liberal arts and general education curriculum, being mindful of our diversity, equity, and inclusion values. I framed the content with material about online learning, growth mindset pedagogy, and whole-student support. Where possible, I made that content location-specific – Geneseo names, examples, and issues – and directed students to on-campus resources. To promote engagement and provide structure in an asynchronous course, I laid out the content within Canvas, punctuated by quizzes and self-reflective writing assignments I had created. Canvas allowed me to take advantage of features like linear pre-requisites and module landing pages to employ cheerful graphics and reminders about how to progress efficiently.

The project’s inception in 2017 met the uncertain need for additional credits under NYS’s new Excelsior program, but that moment also represented an opportunity to rethink some persistent issues in our first-year writing course, INTD 105, of which INTD 106 has been the co-requisite. Instructors in INTD 105 vary in their comfort level with teaching the mechanics of standardized English; likewise, students vary in their pre-existing familiarity with conventions like documentation styles or sophisticated syntax. INTD 105 instructors already face a big task in teaching the moves of analytical writing, yet the equation of “good writing” with “good grammar” is persistent. Providing material on conventions is INTD 106’s primary reason for being: it is the only course on campus that focuses on the conventions of edited, standardized, written American English, although writing according to those conventions is an outcome of over 1200 courses across our curriculum. I wanted exposure to common college-level conventions to be widely accessible to new students, in a format flexible enough that students could concentrate on conventions that were new to them and felt genuinely useful rather than giving equal attention to long lists of partly familiar “rules.” The course can be fully asynchronous online, although it often operates with a face-to-face component for students who reach out to the tutors or the instructor of record. It has traditionally been graded S/U, for one credit.

I was fortunate to have the assistance of the Executive Director of SUNY OER Services on campus to guide me directly to the source material and to walk me through how to edit it. Geneseo’s Canvas team of instructional designers helped me set up the original version and discussed (often at length!) how best to achieve my goals in the iterations over the following two years. A summer stipend paid for my initial work, and Foundation, Milne Library, and Provost’s Office funding allowed me to present at and attend two national OpenEd conferences. The College also paid for a student assistant during the initial summer and for some help grading once the number of students climbed past six hundred per semester. 

One circular design challenge was that in the asynchronous modality, the course’s growth objectives were explained in writing, but students who guessed incorrectly about the course’s purpose would almost by definition not read the writing that would have helped them understand it more accurately. Similarly, some students don’t absorb emails or announcements: all the writing about writing becomes too much, and more detailed explanations become their own barrier to a student actually reading the explanation. I was able to lessen many misunderstandings via instructional design elements and via my “fifteen-minute promise” that if a student would take up my invitation to attend office hours (in person or virtually), I could resolve almost any obstacle in that time. 

Most students work through the course independently and not only find the material accessible, but also appreciate the pedagogical approach. For many, it is a pleasant change to be encouraged to view their writing not as something faulty to “fix” but rather as something positive to expand upon for reasons they themselves generate. INTD 106 is inclusive in its ability to move every student forward from wherever they individually begin and in its emphasis on process and reflection. It is equitable in its presentation of information that not every student has had prior access to and in allowing students to focus on and revisit material at their own pace. The OER format generates a free textbook: I admire the elegance whereby publicly available OER material creates an accessible resource at a public liberal arts college dedicated to inclusivity. Students do, I think, use it for the intended pedagogical goals: by asking students to define, incorporate, and reflect on the value of only six specific skills across the semester (rather than reinforcing unhelpfully vague advice to “use better grammar” or “fix your punctuation”), INTD 106 lets students spend enough time on certain skills in an authentic arena that those skills stick with the student and transfer to other writing scenarios to become new academic writing habits. 

I’m proud of the inclusive and equitable pedagogical approach of the course and have enjoyed presenting it – always with students – both locally and nationally. Faculty who have incorporated it have found its design intuitive and its content useful. The most successful day-to-day moments have reflected its goals: students trying out precisely the conventions they are least sure of, rather than endlessly polishing existing skills, and being grateful, especially in this past eighteen months, for a course that lets them work at their own pace and that operates by encouragement and by endorsing self-efficacy. 

Joe Dolce, Karleen West, and Suann Yang

As there can be many barriers for faculty to teach sustainability (for example, lack of time to develop new classes, feelings of intimidation about teaching sustainability due to its interdisciplinary nature, concern that they don’t know enough about the science, politics, or economics of sustainability) professors Karleen West (Political Science & International Relations) and Suann Yang’s (Biology) developed their own award winning (2020 SUNY FACT2 Excellence in Instruction Award) OER content in the way of the, “Designing Open Modules on Environmental Sustainability (DOMES) Project.”

Led by their belief that sustainability education is crucial for protecting the planet and is a transformational experience for our students they developed a sustainability curriculum that connects multiple disciplines in a flexible way, and provides a framework for students to construct personal philosophies for sustainable decision-making. DOMES infuses sustainability education into already existing classes and incorporates interdisciplinary perspectives using student products (i.e. posters, reports, or papers) developed in other courses in which students reference the products produced by their peers in other courses to reflect on their own personal philosophies for living a sustainable life. Faculty from different disciplines develop modules focused on a specific theme: such as food sustainability. Modules are two to three-week lessons that are free-standing; that is, they can be adapted into courses that are already being taught that are not explicitly about sustainability. Each module results in the creation of a student-generated body of knowledge that is stored digitally on Geneseo’s KnightScholar, and then easily shared across courses.

They wanted to create an open resource that would enable faculty to easily incorporate sustainability into their courses. DOMES does so in several ways:

• It provides plans for short modules (two to three week lessons) that can inspire faculty to teach sustainability with minimal planning.
• These modules don’t require the development of a new course; they can be incorporated into classes that faculty already teach.
• The modules recognize the limitations of learning about sustainability from a single discipline by enabling faculty to use student products created in other disciplines to capture interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainability.

They firmly believe that openly licensing their work is consistent with being faculty members of a public liberal arts institution. But, practically speaking, the DOMES curriculum cannot work if it isn’t a resource freely available. Students must be able to freely access and contribute their digital products to learn from each other in this curriculum.

DOMES was created with the support of two funding sources, The Finger Lakes Project which allowed them to pilot an exchange of student products across two of their courses and The SUNY IITG Award which enabled an expansion of their Food Sustainability Module to other disciplines by training faculty at Geneseo and Monroe Community College to adapt and develop curricular materials for it.

Further resources include Milne Library’s Knight Scholar, through which the metrics can show how often works from DOMES are being accessed or downloaded. One of the biggest rewards is seeing that the works of our students are being accessed more often than anything else in the DOMES curriculum. Currently, we have over 100 student products available on KnightScholar from five different disciplines.

Peer reviews of this work occurred in the form of feedback on the funding opportunities that we sought which differed from their past experience publishing in scholarly journals in that peer review occurred early, at the proposal stage rather than later, after the work would be ready for publication.

Recent Geneseo graduate Evan Burr (Class of 2021) analyzed the student reflection essays from a sampling of courses, and found that students who participated in the Food Sustainability module perceived that the OER introduced or increased their knowledge of the major issues of food sustainability. In addition, they frequently cited the work of other students as contributing to this knowledge gain. However, very few students ended up describing a commitment to changing their dietary habits after these knowledge gains.