Since 2017 Sarah has led a twice-yearly workshop in which over 90 faculty have learned how to find, evaluate and integrate OER resources into courses. The workshop has served as a launching pad for over 185 unique course conversions, many of them for multi-section courses. As of Spring 2022, CUNY SPS offers three undergraduate “Z Degrees” and over half of CUNY SPS undergraduate sections are OER/ZTC. Sarah also facilitates the award-winning Online Teaching Essentials (OTE) workshop, which has trained over 3000 CUNY faculty to teach online in response to the pandemic shutdown. Via OTE, Sarah promoted OER/ZTC online course resources across the entire CUNY system, which serves over 250,000 students, most of whom are low-income, first-generation learners.
Most recently, Sarah developed and offered Open Spring Workshop, highlighting open pedagogy theory and practice. Sarah collaborated with our Disability Studies program faculty to develop an OER Introduction to Disability Studies reader (Introducing Developmental Disability Through a Disability Studies Perspective) and has also worked with our English professors to develop content and ancillary materials for a fully OER, fully online version of College Writing I, one of the most widely-taught courses in the CUNY system. The course can be accessed and taught by CUNY faculty via the CUNY Academic Commons site or downloaded as a ready-to-use course Blackboard cartridge or as a WordPress export. Last, Sarah maintains a database of OER/ZTC course conversions that allows us to track savings and impact across semesters, guiding our planning for future projects.
