This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 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.
Ibrahim Abuelrob is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research centers on speech phenomena and prosody, with particular emphasis on intonational patterns and prosodic structure in Palestinian Arabic and the prosodic typology of Arabic dialects. He also studies speech variation in contexts of urbanization and immigration, contributing to Speech Prosody and Sociophonetics.
It was a delightful experience to participate in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, offered by the Mina Rees Library, and I learned a lot during the process of converting my syllabus into an openly licensed course that relies entirely on zero-cost resources. As a result, my students at Lehman College will not need to deplete their financial resources to purchase a textbook this spring semester, saving them each at least $50. In this blog post, I highlight some of the challenges of using Open Educational Resources (OER). My own experience is in the field of linguistics (the study of language), and I offer a few recommendations for addressing some discipline-specific challenges.
For those who are not well acquainted with OER, it is simply the use of they are cost-free, openly-licensed resources for classroom teaching and learning purposes. As a PhD candidate in linguistics from Palestine, and someone who has taught a range of linguistics courses across three CUNY campuses over the past five years, I feel a deep personal and communal responsibility to ensure that students have equitable and affordable access to higher education. Coming from an economically disenfranchised country that remains under settler-colonial occupation has further sharpened my commitment to minimizing financial barriers for students whenever possible.
The major challenge I encountered during the OER conversion process was the scarcity of openly licensed textbooks and articles that introduce core areas of linguistics—particularly phonology (the study of speech sound patterns)—at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My initial goal was to use David Odden’s Introducing Phonology (2018), but the textbook is not openly licensed. The same applies to Bruce Hayes’s widely used Introductory Phonology (2009). Dispensing with such canonical textbooks is not easy, and it requires substantial labor: reconsidering which topics to retain, which to omit, and how best to align content with students’ aptitude levels. Instructors must balance accessibility with the need to introduce technically demanding material—something that established textbooks often manage well, especially in technically demanding fields.
I found MIT OpenCourseWare to be an extremely helpful resource for both instructors and students of linguistics, as it provides free access to lecture notes, assignments, and other teaching materials. However, the problem of providing students with a comprehensive textbook remains unresolved. For example, phonology courses at MIT often assign Kenstowicz and Kisseberth’s Generative Phonology(1979), a remarkable textbook rich in data from numerous languages across the world. Unfortunately, it is not available for public use, and purchasing a copy can be absurdly expensive for students.
To address these challenges, I offer several recommendations. First, I would highly encourage the readers to explore some of the free-access databases, namely Open Textbook Library, OER Commons, and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). (Of course, there are even more additional resources available! Especially if you consult an OER officer at your campus library.) Also, instructors can make careful use of the “fair use” provisions in copyright policy, which allow limited use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes. Second, contacting authors directly to request permission to use their work—while not guaranteed—can sometimes be successful. Encouragingly, some scholars are increasingly making their work publicly available. For instance, Bruce Hayes generously permits free use of his Introductory Linguistics (2016), provided that users notify him by email.
In addition, I recommend relying on fully open-access journals; in the field of linguistics, such as Glossa, a journal owned and controlled by the linguistics scholarly community. Finally, I strongly encourage instructors—especially those within CUNY—to reach out to their respective GC programs for access to free textbooks, teaching materials, and other shared resources.
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