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.
Sergei Rozhkov is a PhD student in Biology at the CUNY Graduate Center, affiliated with the CUNY School of Medicine. His research interests focus on cancer immunotherapy, biotechnology, and drug discovery. As part of his teaching responsibilities, Sergei teaches Human Biology and Biology 101 courses at CCNY campuses.
Before attending the Open Knowledge Fellowship, I rarely paused to think critically about the types of materials I relied on when preparing my classes or the resources I shared with my students. Like many instructors, I focused primarily on content quality and relevance, without paying much attention to whether those materials were openly accessible or how easily students could continue using them beyond the classroom. Reading the fellowship description was a turning point—it made me realize that evaluating the openness of educational resources could significantly enhance both teaching and learning.
Participating in the fellowship gave me a structured opportunity to explore the landscape of open educational resources and to better understand what “open access” truly means in practice. I learned about different types of open resources, including textbooks, databases, digital tools, and multimedia content, and discovered several high-quality materials directly relevant to the course I am teaching. For example, I identified open-access databases containing stained human tissues and organs, which serve as valuable resources for students studying human histology. This experience reshaped how I think about course design and reinforced the importance of equity and accessibility in education.
Throughout the fellowship, we engaged in meaningful discussions on timely topics such as the use of artificial intelligence in education, ethical considerations around data and authorship, and strategies for integrating open resources into curricula. One particularly valuable component was learning how to use the CUNY Academic Commons as a platform for building a course website. We were given ample time to think through the structure and design of our sites, experiment with different layouts, and ask detailed questions about technical features such as page setup, navigation, and content organization. As a result of that, I created a Commons course site, which I am making more and more helpful for my students.
Equally important was the collaborative aspect of the fellowship. Seeing the projects developed by other participants allowed me to reflect on my own work, gain inspiration, and identify areas for improvement. Beyond the academic benefits, I also had the pleasure of meeting many thoughtful and engaging colleagues. Attending the fellowship seminars became not only a learning experience but also a meaningful way to connect, exchange ideas, and build a sense of community.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
