2023 Open Education Awards for Excellence

For this episode take a trip with us to the City University of New York (CUNY) where Sarah Kresh shares her open education efforts at the School of Professional Studies (SPS). In listening to Sarah you will understand why she was named a winner of a 2022 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Emerging Leader category. We hope this inspires you to consider a person or project to nominate for the 2023 OE Awards — nominations are open now through June 30, 2023.

Sarah shares her journey from degrees in linguistics to teaching, implementing technology, and ultimately her current role in the SPS Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology. As an entirely online program, the SPS has made strong efforts to address student needs through an extensive Zero Textbook Cost program plus advocating practices of open pedagogy and addressing diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility into course design. And as a bonus you will learn why Sarah loves her outdoor activity time.

Listen in to our conversation with Sarah and be thinking as well who you consider a key open educator worthy of a 2023 OE Award in Leadership (or any other category). Are you inspired? Start the process now and your efforts will help identify a future guest on this podcast.

Notes and Quotes for Episode 57

What I’m excited about and many people at my school are excited about is how OER and Zero Textbook Cost are concepts that are not taken for granted exactly, but just much more accepted and part of the culture at our school. This gives us the opportunity to start thinking about Open Pedagogy and also how OER and Open Pedagogy fit with different kinds of initiatives that are of interest.

At our school there’s a tremendous interest in diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility throughout the institution. We’ve been talking about these issues amongst the staff, amongst the faculty, and we have a Faculty Advisory Board to our office, the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology, and the Faculty Advisory Board has expressed a lot of interest in how DEIA fits into the process of online course development and online course review.

Sarah Kresh

• CHILDES: Child Language Data Exchange System (Carnegie Mellon University)
• New York State Government OER Initiative
• City University of New York (CUNY)
  • Open Educational Resources (CUNY Library Services)
  • CUNY Open Education Research Program
• School of Professional Studies
  • OER @ SPS (CUNY School of Professional Studies)
  • Zero Textbook Courses
  • CUNY School of Professional Studies Leads Online Teaching Workshops for CUNY Faculty
  • CUNY Online Teaching Essentials

The most exciting project recently that we’ve worked on is offering faculty a workshop where we provided them with some of these annotations, modelled after the Cal State- SUNY project that I just mentioned. [We] asked them to use these annotations along with the course review rubric to look at their course and reevaluate it from that perspective and then propose some sort of revision to activities, the content, the course design, and the online learning management system platform. The proposals that we had emphasized different OER and Open Pedagogy approaches to how you can increase inclusivity in the online classroom.

Sarah Kresh

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Course Design Rubric (University of California)
• DEI Collaborative (Multiple institutions)
• DEI Rubric for Equitable Course Design (Ease Learning)
• SPS Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity
• Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series – Using OER & Open Pedagogy to foster DEIA in online courses (CUNY SPS, last offered March 2023)

But for our OER initiative specifically at SPS, one of the things we’re looking forward to is we recently acquired a platform called OpenLab…. an open,WordPress based platform that our whole school will be able to use. One of the things that I’m excited about for our OER initiative group is to try to get more of our materials on this open platform.

Sarah Kresh

• CBOX OpenLab (part of the CUNY Commons in a Box Project) functionality of
  • CUNY OpenLab (City Tech)
  • City Tech courses on OpenLab
• CUNY Pressbooks
  • Published Open textbooks (Pressbooks Directory)
    • Concepts in Statistics (CUNY SPS)
    • H5P Activities (Concepts in Statistics)
• CUNY Academic Commons
• Manifold (Open publishing platform, see OEG Voices Episode 14)
• SPS Digitcation Eportolios (Digication)

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called  Jonah’s Message for New York by Doctor Turtle  licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction was created with the OEG Voices Mixer featuring voices of Gardner C, Patrina L, Kristin H, Clint L, Lena P, Lori-Beth L, Maren D, Laura H, Lorna C, Kevin H, Werner W, and Doug B (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.