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.

Michael Villanova is a doctoral candidate in political theory at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation is on the political tradition of “urban revanchism,” investigating the intersection between antidemocratic politics, urban citizenship, and the appeals of reactionary movements.

I applied to the Open Knowledge Fellowship out of a naïve, but sincere, belief in CUNY’s mission that knowledge can be a public good. As a CUNY student since 2015 – first as an undergrad at CCNY, then as a graduate student at The Graduate Center – I know how important public higher education is for students’ edification and careers. Still, the cost of education gets in the way of achieving the goal of making education accessible, open, and public.

I started the Fellowship with a decent idea of what OER was. I have taught my “Intro to American Government” course many times using a free OER textbook. The textbook I used was as engaging, up-to-date, and as clear and informative as the costly textbook I was mandated to use when I taught one semester at a private institution. But I was a bit unclear about the scope of OER resources and how, as an adjunct instructor, OER could fit into the goal of making education more accessible. The Fellowship did a fantastic job at showing how many resources are at our disposal to make our classes more democratic, cheaper, and interesting. As a result, I incorporated a lot of the tools and resources into my updated course.

I decided to adapt my “Democracy and its Critics” course, a class that offers an introduction to the history of democratic theory and its detractors. While one might expect that theory classes would be easy to adapt to OER principles (most major works in the theory canon are in the public domain), adapting the class to OER principles required revamping my class and using tools I had not previously used for my classroom. 

First, I created a course website on the CUNY Academic Commons. By doing so, students will be able to access resources from the class long after the course is over. Further, this allows me to remix the site and update it for continual use. Next, inspired by my time in the classroom and workshops in the Fellowship, I updated my syllabus, my classroom policies to be clearer and more accessible, included more instruction on navigating my course site and syllabus, and updated my AI policies (completely banned in my class now).  Finally, my syllabus and website were edited with the open-source editora11y widget (that Margaret Miller showed us how to use) to make my course accessible to web reader tools.

The Open Knowledge Fellowship also allowed me to reflect on the place of education and my role as an instructor in the age of AI and the attacks on higher education. By banning AI in my classroom and stressing the importance of open learning, I reframed my syllabus and assignments around low-stakes, in-class writing assignments and short group reading exercises. I retooled the readings for my class based on what I learned in the Fellowship’s workshops. Jill Cirasella’s presentations on sourcing open-access literature and commons creative licenses pointed me towards incorporating readings and assignments from Project Gutenberg, the Open Database of Books, and the works in CUNY’s Manifold repository, as well as how to know when to use proofs and copies of writings posted by their original authors. 

One of the OER tools that I found most exciting was Pressbooks. I compiled the readings from my syllabus into a reader using PressBooks, creating a personalized textbook for the class that is free and accessible. Not only will this save money for my students, but the reader will also make class instruction easier: my students will have the same translation of each text, and the reader removes the problem of possibly different pagination or students having to download or find the readings. Creating a reader with short introductions to the readings is labor-intensive but worthwhile. The Fellowship stressed to me the possibilities of OER in the humanities and social sciences and how funding for OER resources and classroom instruction is vital for achieving the goal of education as a public good.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.