This is the twelfth post in our current series of short essays by participants in the Open Knowledge Fellowship, spring 2022 cohort, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Samuel Teeple is an adjunct lecturer at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, and a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation investigates the music of Jewish Berlin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, more broadly, Jewish contributions to German music. Before moving to New York, he earned two Master’s degrees in tuba performance and music history from Bowling Green State University. Outside of research and teaching, he is a lead developer of the GC Music Teaching Hub, an online repository of open source teaching materials developed by CUNY graduate students.

When I was preparing to teach for the first time, I spent months imagining how I would transform the standard Music Appreciation course: incorporating popular and folk musics to diversify the classical canon, for instance, and exchanging the typical exam structure for scaffolded and low-stakes writing assignments. As I talked through my plans with my department faculty, however, I was constantly reminded that as a graduate student, research took priority over teaching. In other words, I needed to minimize wherever possible the amount of time I spent on grading and class preparation. 

Though I had originally planned to compile my own reading list of freely available sources, I changed course after seeing colleagues with a similar pedagogical model become overwhelmed mid-semester. Instead, I  adopted a textbook by a for-profit publisher, albeit one that matched my curricular goals. To offset in part the closed nature of our textbook, I also designed a course site on the CUNY Academic Commons that included a public-facing class blog. 

While I was pleased with how well my students took to regularly producing and sharing short-form writing, the onset of the pandemic and transition to online teaching exposed the many barriers to access that my students faced on a regular basis—a substantial number lacked home internet and a laptop, let alone their own copy of our textbook. The stress, fear, and uncertainty that made 2020 such a challenge for my students had the same effect on me—it was all I could do to maintain the course as it was.

The return to in-person teaching in early 2022 brought with it a much-needed sense of community and renewed engagement, but if anything these positive experiences only highlighted the gap between my original vision for the course and its current iteration. Whenever I thought about exchanging my textbook for open access materials, I was cowed by the amount of time and effort I imagined such a process taking. I had spent years designing my slides, quizzes, lectures, and course schedules around my textbook—how could I square a complete course overhaul with the axiom of “researcher first, teacher second”?

Thankfully, the Open Pedagogy Fellowship gave me the space and resources needed to resolve this dilemma. In the remainder of this blog post, I want to share some of the strategies that allowed me to re-create my course with Open Educational Resources (OER) while minimizing my own time and labor. Since my own course is introductory and geared toward non-majors, these tips may be less useful to someone teaching an upper-level or seminar-style course. 

Open-Access Textbooks

Replacing your current textbook with a hand-picked miscellany of individual readings—my first instinct when brainstorming a course overhaul—is obviously a time-intensive activity. This process of curation becomes even more difficult when limiting oneself to open-access resources. As an alternative, I recommend selecting one or two OER textbooks to serve as the primary references for the course. After you’ve outlined the main topics with chapters from these texts, you can then add depth and breadth as needed with stand-alone readings. 

While not all disciplines are as well served by OER textbooks, you can find an increasing number of options through OER hubs and aggregator sites, like the OER Commons, Galileo Open Learning Materials, or any of the websites linked in the Mina Rees Library “Finding OER” Research Guide.

Balancing Blackboard with the Commons

The CUNY Academic Commons—the site that this blog is hosted on—offers a free open-access space to create an online home for your course. While the Commons allows you to collect and comment on student posts, it does not have its own gradebook. During my first semester using the Commons, I had all 25 students submit all work via email or the Commons and kept grades independently—an exhausting state of affairs. One way to streamline this process is to use Blackboard for assignment submissions and grading as a complement to the Commons.

If you’ve never used the Commons or a WordPress interface before, check out this collection of illustrated guides from the Teaching and Learning Center, or attend one of their regular workshops on the topic. Keep in mind that you’ll need to spend class time introducing the Commons and Blackboard, especially for first-year students. I recommend building in a set of scaffolded, low-stakes assignments for the Commons onboarding process—for instance, setting up a profile, commenting on a Welcome post, and finally posting a blog.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel—Use What You’ve Got!

The process of converting a course to open access doesn’t require you to throw out all your pre-existing content. You can use your original course schedule as a template to fill in with new OER readings, even maintaining the types and due dates of assignments and assessments.

The day-to-day content of your class will likely require the most transformation, since your new OER texts likely discuss different examples and concepts. Your current slides and lectures, however, will likely have some overlap with the new layout; you can supplement these with the free instructor materials included with many newer OER textbooks. 

Lastly, you may come across readings or other media that aren’t open access but you feel are absolutely essential to incorporate into your class. In this case, you can “link out” through the Commons to a free, legal version of the media; if it’s a library resource, you can link the students to the work at their own campus library, which they can then download after logging in. 

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