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.
Juan Rúa-Serna is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center, concentrating in International Relations and Comparative Politics. His research examines the links between immigration, political participation, and integration.
Teaching in the age of generative artificial intelligence sometimes feels like becoming a cop. There is a system of lawful practices: reading, highlighting ideas, taking notes, thinking, writing more notes, and finally coming up with one’s own ideas and words. That is the standard. Breaking the law entails bypassing these behaviors—for instance, having an AI model read for you, summarize the argument, and write the draft. Suddenly, you find yourself suspecting your students. Is this something a student would write? Is this AI? What “big word” or phrasing will rat the student out? Since being a cop is the last thing I want to be, I decided that my approach would not be based on enforcing “academic law,” but on opening up opportunities for students to learn in a creative, lively, collective, and meaningful fashion. The Open Education Resources (OER) approach is a key ally in teaching for this purpose.
My intuition is that many social science students turn to artificial intelligence as a response to financial barriers and incentives deeply ingrained in the logic of academia. Accessing a variety of learning resources can be prohibitively expensive. Few students can afford a private tutor to deepen their knowledge; many lack the time or energy to utilize office hours effectively, and others lack the social and cultural capital to engage in networks of collective learning. While universities often provide writing support, the act of composing and editing remains a daunting task. AI, then, appears as a solution. Platforms offer free models, and tech giants like Google provide free subscriptions to students. For those who cannot afford supplemental materials or one-on-one tutoring, AI becomes a highly attractive tool for improving their “results.” It is marketed as a free tutor, a research assistant, and an ever-present, “understanding” companion for learning.
The OER approach addresses this challenge by offering a variety of materials used to build more engaging content and present students with diverse strategies for learning. This approach goes well beyond merely finding free textbooks; inspired by the spirit of open knowledge, many scholars have developed a myriad of materials to motivate students to think creatively. For instance, role-play games and simulations encourage students to use their imagination to navigate social issues. Case studies allow them to apply theories to concrete, empirical realities, while archival materials connect abstract theory to tangible history. All of these are powerful ways to invite students to question the world around them. Platforms such as the OER Commons are excellent places to find these resources. Ultimately, providing a variety of sources and “languages” that speak to the same issue helps students reach their own unique understandings.
Integrating art is particularly conducive to this result. Political Science, as a discipline, can draw on a vast legacy of art created to address major historical and political phenomena. Many significant paintings, drawings, and photographs capable of sparking powerful thinking and conversation are now in the public domain and can be integrated into a variety of assignments. Consider this brief example:
Imagine you are teaching about the German unification process. You will probably assign some big names to your syllabus: the Hans Ulrich Wehlers, the Wolfgang Mommsens, and so on. You should. Using the painter Anton von Werner’s work, however, can be an amazing vehicle to get students to think deeply about the weight Bismarck carried during the unification process. He was not the Emperor, and yet in the painting, he is the one who looks like one: imposing, the highest of all, even if he is physically lower than the Emperor. Students can also think about the location: the proclamation of the German Empire occurring in France, in the Palace of Versailles. It wasn’t an act of conquest—as the Germans did not annex France into their regime—but something else. What else? What does this choice say about the tensions and the messy history shared by these two countries? A wealth of questions appear here.
This connects to the second point I mentioned earlier: “incentives.” We face one primary incentive: to consume many, many ideas and readings, and then to produce and write as fast as possible—to write, produce, publish, present, discuss, and publish again (and again, and again, and again). We are pushed to edit as many books as we can and contribute to as many journals as we are invited to. This incentive often leads us to follow practices that standardize how we think. Most AI models are, I believe, a mere reflection of the way academia has already standardized our intelligence. The OER approach is an opportunity to “breaking out the black box.” Before starting this fellowship, I thought OER was simply about finding free PDFs for my students and making sure everything was easy to find. It is way more than that. OER gives you access to all kinds of materials that express different logics, cultures, and ways of thinking—all of which you can incorporate into a program that seeks to explore different ways of learning.I recognize these ideas face a significant hurdle. AI will continue to be a primary assistant for students who simply do not have the time or energy to complete all their coursework on their own. Students who work, have heavy caregiving responsibilities, or are dealing with serious health or family issues will still have strong incentives to have AI read and write for them. However, within the limitations of what we can do, OER gives us more tools to design classes that can become sites of creativity, sensibility, and joy.
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