Recognized as an Open Community
From the nominator:
For fourteen years, the OpenLab at City Tech has shown what’s possible when everyone at a college can access community-built open infrastructure specifically designed for open practices and the public good. In a landscape dominated by proprietary edtech and walled gardens, the OpenLab stands as a community garden of openness, where members can plant seeds together, nurture them, and watch them grow. Beyond City Tech, it provides a powerful model and active support for other open spaces.
At a difficult moment for higher education and the open movement, when the advance of extractive proprietary technologies often seems inevitable, we believe the OpenLab offers an inspiring model, in its scope, range, scale, and resilience. Its expansive concept of openness welcomes the whole college, supporting everything from ambitious OER projects and open pedagogies to individual acts of sharing. And, after fourteen years, thousands of members are still finding new ways to use it, speaking to the enduring need for an open space that has become part of life at the college. It’s a model others can follow too – through a multi-institution collaboration, we’ve made the OpenLab’s underlying software freely and publicly available; Commons In A Box OpenLab is being adopted by others in New York and beyond to grow OpenLabs of their own.
This is an exemplary program. To have built a sustainable operation over 14 years on the back of a start up grant is rare in the Open Education world. The key appears to be creating a truly open community of users who can experiment on the OpenLab platform to create OER in varying shapes and sixes. On top of this the platform itself can easily be replicated and adapted for use by others. I also like the metaphor of a community garden for OpenLab as it implies it is a welcoming and non-threatening environment in which to do want you want to do in teaching and learning.
Award Reviewer
The OpenLab at City Tech is a highly commendable project that builds an infrastructure for open education and practices at a Hispanic-Serving public college of technology. I find their description of the initiative to be extremely well written and exciting: “In a landscape dominated by proprietary edtech and walled gardens, the OpenLab stands as a community garden of openness, where members can plant seeds together, nurture them, and watch them grow.” There is much to admire here, from the reach of over 47,000 members to the underlying software, Commons in A Box, that is freely and publicly available, and other project aspects.
Award Reviewer
Learn More
- Open Lab at City Tech (CUNY)
- In the Spotlight (Open Road Blog category, City Tech)
- Commons in a Box (CUNY)
