At Guttman Community College the Open Educational Resource Initiative is constructing a repository of courses designed by Guttman faculty to make their resources, assignments and course structures available to colleagues at the college and to a wider collection of educators. With this goal in mind, on Friday 6/24 the Guttman community was invited participate in a paid PD that trained faculty members to build a course site on CUNY’s Academic Commons. Led by Maggie Dickinson, Samuel Finesurrey and Carolyn Stallard, this PD focused on transferable skills by introducing professors to WordPress. As online platforms and open pedagogy become increasingly vital to the college and the larger world of higher education, we expect this workshop to pay tremendous dividends to our faculty and students in the years to come.
This PD amplifies the mission of the OER Initiative at Guttman by collaborating with faculty members to adopt, alter and create open educational resources. With annual textbook savings for students totaling over $220,000 last year, we believe the development of this repository for Guttman courses will build on our success by making the zero cost resources already used in many of the college’s courses more widely available. Simultaneously, by creating a central open access hub for Guttman courses we can further our collective aim of selecting and authoring class materials to be responsive to our students’ experiences in this current historic and political moment.
