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.
H. Hüma Yardım is a PhD student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests focus on medicine, incarceration, social history, memory studies, and photography in the late Ottoman Empire.
One of the reasons I applied to the Open Knowledge Fellowship was to become more aware not only of Open Educational Resources themselves and how to access them, but also of the labor that goes into creating them. As a PhD student and an educator who relies on Open-Access publications in my daily work, it can be easy to simply find a source and forget to appreciate the people behind it. I wanted to change my relationship to scholarly publishing.
In the fellowship, I received training in finding OER to use in the classroom, as well as how to be discerning in selecting resources.. As I cite works or create syllabi for my classes, it is essential to select materials that help my students learn how to critically engage with a text and make sense of the world through literature. By bringing together a multidisciplinary cohort, the Fellowship also provided a space to discuss concerns within our fields while learning how scholars in other disciplines approach similar issues.
Case studies presented by previous Fellows demonstrated how the resources we create for our classes can be made accessible to a wider audience. Maura McCreight’s presentation on her Open and Accessible Photographic History Manifold project gave me a new perspective on the potentials for writing about my work beyond the scope of an academic audience. Through that presentation, together with another given by Librarian Donna Davey on how to access archival resources, I became familiar with digital archives that I would not normally consider having access to as a historian of the Ottoman Empire. Another highlight of the fellowship was learning more about the CUNY Academic Commons website. Although I was familiar with it from a Digital Humanities class I took, I wasn’t aware of how much I could do with the Commons, from creating a syllabus page to having an integrated blog page for class updates.
The emphasis on creating an accessible syllabus is the most important takeaway for me from this fellowship. Before the program, my understanding of an accessible syllabus was limited to one that consisted mainly of open-access sources. However, the fellowship helped me recognize that an accessible syllabus should address the needs of all students in the classroom and be written in clear, concise language with a well-organized structure. During the discussions and training sessions, I was not only asked to create a syllabus, but I also engaged in conversations that allowed me to see how others approach accessibility and how they integrate OER into their coursework. These exchanges helped me think more critically about how I could incorporate similar strategies into my own teaching.
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