This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2025 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will 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.
John D. Frank is a PhD student in Political Science at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He has taught sociology as an Adjunct Lecturer for over twenty years at Lehman College and LaGuardia Community College. His research focuses on theories of identity formation and political identity. He holds a BA from Columbia, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard, and an MFA from City College of New York.
My journey into the uncharted waters of Open Educational Resources (OER) began in 2022. I was invited to teach a course on Gender and Sexuality and forwarded a model syllabus that fully embraced OER. I instantly became a fan. I loved the easy access to readings, their varied lengths, and the multiple mediums used (TED Talks, YouTube, and documentaries). Since then, I’ve made strides to employ more OER or, at least, to ensure a zero textbook cost (ZTC).
The central challenge I confronted was that even if I found select readings I liked, they didn’t come with the package of goodies, like exam questions, PowerPoint slides, and other instructor materials. That put the onus on me to create those materials myself.
When the email about the Open Knowledge Fellowship popped up in my Inbox, I eagerly signed up. The fellowship came wrapped in a nicely numbered stipend. How could I say, no?
During this fellowship, I’ve learned a ton. Most importantly, where to turn to find materials. I’ve compiled a list of places to search, such as doaj.org, doabooks.org, unpaywall.org, merlot.org, oercommons.org, opened.cuny.edu, the digital library at the Library of Congress, NYPL, or Smithsonian Institute. I also learned more about Creative Commons licenses.
I had one particularly enlightening conversation with the Graduate Center’s librarian, Jill Cirasella. It was on the first day of the fellowship. I asked her about fair use practices. She explained in basic terms that if there’s a copyrighted book out there, educators could use a selection of it as educational material. She said: think of fair use as if you’re using the readings as a handout. She also discussed the 10% common “rule.” That is, if you use less than 10% of a book, it’s typically within the universe of fair use practices. She emphasized that there’s no hard and fast rule about what is the official cut-off for using copyrighted materials. But her explanation made sense; most of my graduate-level courses use only one chapter of any book.
One of the deliverables of this fellowship was building out my CUNY Academic Commons site for American Political Science, which I’ll be teaching in the Fall of 2025. The course uses a widely used textbook that is accessible on Openstax. With the help of other GC students, I successfully located other materials, videos, and depositories for old documents like the Federalist Papers or books that are in the public domain (any book that is 100 years old).
Since OER materials for Political Science were readily available, I took the opportunity to design another course I teach at York College, Social Change. I’m happy to say that the course has a ZTC. With the help of several librarians, I found a textbook available online at the York Library. I learned that I could provide links to the textbook, and students were a click away from accessing the chapters. I also uploaded three, singular chapters from three different books. In order to create quizzes, tests, essay questions, or other materials, I’ve utilized ChatGPT to help craft Discussion Board questions and NotebookLM to produce podcasts on the assigned readings. What I once thought to be the downside of using OER, (having to make instructional materials myself), AI has been instrumental and a time saver in the process.
Final Reflections: By providing students with OER, videos, and AI-generated podcasts, students can learn on the go. They have what they need right at their fingertips, giving them access to learning anywhere they are. And to me, that’s gold.
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