This is the latest in our current series of short essays by participants in the Open Knowledge Fellowship 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.

Yunhua Zhao is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research concentrates on the area of machine learning for software engineering, especially software quality assurance and mining software repositories. She taught discrete mathematics, and during the Open Knowledge Fellowship process, she finished her class syllabus for the course entitled Introduction to Discrete Structure at Brooklyn College using Open Access resources.

I was very excited to become a new instructor. The first step to prepare for the Discrete Structure class was to create the syllabus, and there were several problems that came to my mind when I considered the task at hand. For example, I contemplated what the syllabus should include, what the difficulty level should be, where I could find resources to train myself to be a good instructor, and whether there are helpful resources that any student could easily access, without having to pay for usage. All of these questions needed to be answered clearly.

As a researcher, I deeply understand the important role of open resources. Ideally, they shouldn’t be only free to access but also content-rich. However, as a teacher, how should I select the most appropriate resources and adapt them to my class? The Open Knowledge Fellowship provided chances for me to learn about what kind of resources are open access, where I could find such resources, and how to build a professional and useful course website. Since the OER training was one semester ahead of my teaching semester, my first paywall-free syllabus could be made in time to prepare for my first class. All of these considerations encouraged me to apply for the Open Knowledge fellowship.

I really learned a lot from this fellowship about Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER). In the past, I had relied on Google Scholar as the main tool for me to search for books and papers, but I could not figure out which resources were an open access resource and which were not. Additionally, it was unclear to me whether I should include the materials I found in my class and how I should cite them correctly. I was really confused about these questions, as I had almost no knowledge about these kinds of resources, and I was unsure as where to find answers for these questions, especially since it is time consuming to check them individually and summarize everything by myself. But now I have fully understood the concepts of OA and OER and I know where I can find answers. 

On the web pages about Open Access and Open Educational Resources at the Mina Rees Library, there are several very convenient and powerful websites that we can use directly, like journal tools, book tools and OA policy tools. From the OER repositories, I found several MIT open textbooks and courses from which I got a better understanding about how to teach my class on discrete mathematics. I also found two useful open access books which all my students could use. 

The CUNY Academic Commons, which I did not know about before, is also a really powerful resource. There, I can create free sites and groups. I cannot only use it to create course websites, but I can also post blogs there as a communication platform with other researchers and students.

Now, I can always check the materials I use in my class, whether some content in my presentation is open access or not, if I can remix these materials or if I can use them directly. The knowledge about OA and OER will benefit my teaching and research journey.

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