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 Corredor-Garcia is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He earned a BA in Political Science at Universidad del Rosario, a MPhil in Political Sociology at Sciences Po Bordeaux and Université de Bordeaux. He has worked as an Adjunct Instructor at Hunter, Lehman, and Fordham University.

The first time I learned about the existence of Open Educational Resources (OER) was back in Spring 2025 when I was invited to apply for the “Enhancing Your (Online or Hybrid) Course Through the Open Educational Resources (OER) Workshop” at Lehman College. This was part of a suggested training I should take before teaching a hybrid course in Comparative Politics. This course had an in-person weekly session and an online asynchronous component.  

I was struck by the outstanding pedagogical, teaching, and research opportunities that OER brings to the classroom. I learned that alternative forms of teaching, writing, and research were available to me and my students. Adopting zero-cost materials could be a form of assisting students in saving money for purchasing expensive textbooks without sacrificing quality and engagement. I found a few OER materials in Political Science in the form of introductory textbooks in the major subfield of the discipline, namely, American Politics, and two textbooks on my area of expertise: 1) Introduction to Comparative Government and Politics and 2) A Casebook for Comparative Politics. I updated my syllabus, included chapters from these two textbooks, and adopted OER for the course I taught at Lehman College in Fall 2025.  

This first encounter increased my desire to engage in more detail with OER. I applied to the Open Knowledge Fellowship with three purposes: to become part of a larger community of Graduate Center instructors who were engaging with OER, to get a deeper understanding of research and pedagogical tools with Manifold and CUNY Academic Commons, and to propose to create an open-license manuscript of my master’s thesis.  

My experience with the Open Knowledge Fellowship was formidable. I found inspiration, passion, and innovation from former fellows and instructors. I also learned about great tools used by current fellows in courses they were teaching in very different fields like Art History, Biology, Italian, and Criminal Justice, to name just a few cases. I appreciated how rough ideas started as drafts and then became excellent tools for developing pedagogical websites. But the most important takeaway was that the adoption of OER is a scaffolding process that requires constant work: perseverance is the strategy to develop sound OER projects.  There is a lot of independent work, but when you share these materials with your students, class engagement and participation are remarkably higher than when you use old-fashioned materials.  

My fellowship journey culminated with a big surprise. In the first week of the fellowship, I searched for new textbooks on my subfield but only found the existing textbooks that I used for my Fall 2025 course. Yet I found an updated version of one of these textbooks. In the introduction of A Casebook for Comparative Politics,  the editor of the volume, Mark Johnson, indicated that new cases were under development and will be released in new version through the middle of 2026, and that potential contributors should reach out to him for further information.  

I sent an email to Mark with the idea of proposing a new chapter on Colombia, the country where I was born and raised. This textbook is intended to serve as a companion text for lower-division undergraduate courses in Comparative Politics. The textbook included cases from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, but only one case in Latin America and the Caribbean: Cuba. I thought that I could write something about Colombia that would help inspire undergraduate students to learn more about political cases in the Global South that contradict the assumptions of comparative politics, such as that democracy cannot coexist with violence, and that economic development is not possible if political instability remains. Colombia has been a relative stable democracy in a region with constant coup d’états and dictatorships. Nevertheless, this political stability coexists with an internal civil war that lasted 60 years and transformed into post-war violence after 2016. The democratic contradiction in Colombia is worth exploring because it surpasses binaristic understandings of democratic regimes as merely peaceful countries, and autocratic regimes as exclusively violent countries. Colombia, despite its extremely high levels of violence, is a country known for its many peace efforts, negotiations, and agreements in 1958, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998, and 2012.  

I was lucky enough to get a positive response from Dr. Johnson who kindly agreed to allow me to write the chapter on Colombia for the new version of the edited volume, to be published by the end of 2026. Therefore, instead of writing a full manuscript in CUNY Pressbooks–my original idea when I applied for the fellowship—this excellent news meant I could accomplish a more reasonable goal in the Open Knowledge Fellowship).  

While my fellowship journey consisted of individual research, the examples of other OER projects I encountered in the fellowship have inspired me to pursue more collaborative projects with my students in the future. I designed a scaffold assignment in my Comparative Politics course where students should submit country briefs with several deliverables every two or three weeks. Nevertheless, one of the problems is that the student contributions only stay in Brightspace. A future project could involve the same scaffold assignment to be published in Manifold. Based on what I learned in the Fellowship, I will eventually develop a Manifold project inviting students to become writers of blog entries about countries they choose to work on during a semester.    I am confident that students will value an assignment like this because their labor will be hosted on a public website, in a publication that they can eventually include in their curriculum vitae. But this is part of another journey I am hoping to co-create in the future.  

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