We encourage participants to hang their posters in E-500 prior to the start of the symposium. The poster session will start after the break-out sessions end at 11:00 am. For complete schedule information for the symposium, click here.
Anne Valk (CUNY Graduate Center) Who Built America? An OER for Teaching American History
Between 2019-2025, the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at CUNY, developed an OER featuring the textbook, Who Built America? along with a repository of thousands of primary source documents, specialized essays, and other resources for teaching American history. This poster showcases the new resources and highlights some special features that are already being adopted by faculty for classroom use.
Juline Koken, Maureen Doyle and Govindi Singh (LaGuardia Community College) Creating OER Motivational Interviewing Videos for Community College Learners
Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence supported form of communication used in social work, human services, education, and healthcare. The standard training videos for MI are proprietary, cost money to use in classroom settings, and feature primarily white MI providers and clients. Recognizing that these videos were not meeting the needs of our diverse learning community, we undertook to create our own MI educational videos with diverse faculty and student collaborators. The videos were supported with funds from the New York State Empire Development fund as well as an OER grant. Filming was completed in Fall 2 and editing is finishing in Spring. The videos will be OER and available on youtube for use by any college classroom or MI learning environment from June 2025 onward, a significant contribution to the MI learning community.
Natalia Biani, Roman Senkov and Boris Zakharov (LaGuardia Community College) Gone with the MOM: Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy Edition
Several studies have explored the relationship between homework completion and academic achievement as well as motivation in college students. Here, we present a description of an OER project based on homework practices for students of SCB 208 – Vertebrate Anatomy and Physiology. This upper-level elective course is highly sought after by students interested in animal science. We designed 11 assignments that correspond to the topics covered each week in SCB 208. Each assignment consists of approximately 10 questions where students can choose their answers from a set number of options. The advantage of this type of exercise is two-fold. On the one hand, students benefit from practicing these questions as many times as they like – the attempt with the highest score is the one that is considered for the final grade. On the other hand, although it requires an initial time investment, the instructor does not need to spend time grading each student’s work because the grade is automatically calculated. These assignments are available in the free platform MyOpenMath (MOM).
Yazhu Liu (Borough of Manhattan Community College) Adopting OER in Mathematics: Helpyourmath
This poster showcases the BMCC Math Department’s efforts in adopting Open Educational Resources (OER), with a focus on the development and use of Helpyourmath. The initiative is designed to promote student equity and access, reduce textbook costs, and enhance instructional support. Attendees will gain insights into faculty engagement and platform usage, and explore the platform’s key features.
Elizabeth Jardine, Derek Stadler, Linda Barber, and Anne O’Reilly (LaGuardia Community College) FinLit for Life: OER for Financial Literacy at a Community College
In 2022, the Library at LaGuardia Community College received a grant to support academic library efforts to meet financial and/or investor education needs at the community college level. A team of Library faculty and staff developed an open educational resource (OER) on personal financial literacy, called FinLit for Life: Teaching Financial Literacy at a Community College. We created FinLit for Life in collaboration with eight LaGuardia students who provided feedback and suggestions on the material so that it spoke more to their lived experience. In this project, we also sought to apply a critical financial literacy perspective in our OER.
Elin Waring and Bridget Lepore (Lehman College) 10 Things to Know: A College Success Book for CUNY Students
Students come to college for many reasons, but leave college for just a few, including a lack of understanding of their new identities as students and college scholars. As part of the First Year Initiative at Lehman College, we redesigned the first-year seminar.
As part of our work, we reviewed existing books, looking for one that would support our students as they adjusted to college life and would speak to their needs and experiences. Most of the books we found focused on full-time students who are living on campus. We set out to create a book for the first-year students at Lehman College, one that would help them understand fundamental things about college so that they could navigate their new community successfully. The result was an open educational resource -10 Things to know to survive, thrive, and dive into college learning – focused on 10 big ideas that students needed to know as the experience their first year and beyond.
Sandra Ribeiro (LaGuardia Community College) OER Textbook for Physical Therapist Assistant Therapeutic Mobility Training
An OER Textbook was developed with videos to replace textbooks in two courses covering mobility content in the Physical Therapist Assistant Program. The OER textbook was piloted in two classes, with surveys administered at various times to gauge student satisfaction and usage.
Marta Kowalczyk (LaGuardia Community College) Summary of the Transition to Open Educational Resources (OER) in the Natural Sciences Department.
The goal of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the Natural Sciences Department is to develop and enhance learning environments and online offerings that promote student engagement, learning, and success. This report outlines our department’s transition to OER in biology, chemistry, and physics courses. By the end of the fourth transition year, we are using OER materials in over fifteen courses across nearly 230 sections, resulting in savings of more than $1.2 million for students enrolled in these courses. Expanding our OER offerings is an equitable solution to support the success of our underserved students, as equity and access are crucial in helping them achieve an associate degree. This report will highlight success stories and pathways toward zero-textbook-cost (ZTC) and OER in the biology, chemistry, and physics classes.
Alioune Khoule (LaGuardia Community College) Classroom interventions using Myopenmath
Increasing retention and success rates, using innovative techniques, is one of the core objectives in community colleges. Several researches have shown that interventions strategies boost such rates in high and middle schools. The purpose of this study is to examine how classroom interventions, using Open Educational Resources, impacts student’s mathematics achievements in a remedial mathematics course at a community college. This quantitative research used cluster sampling to obtain a sample of 44 students from two fundamental algebra sections in Fall 2018 semester at LaGuardia Community College, New York City, US. The instruments used in this study are the first and second attempts of two departmental exams and the final exam scores. After each departmental exam, students were divided into two groups, a basic and advance group, based on their performances on the exam. Each group had a 4-hour intervention session separately before they were given a second attempt for the departmental exam. The difference between the first and second attempt of departmental exam 1 and departmental exam 2 average scores were calculated to evaluate students’ improvements after the interventions. Correlations were performed to assess the strength of the relationship between each departmental exam and the final exam. The result of this quantitative research showed that the classroom interventions helped students improve their departmental exams scores. However, departmental exam 2 intervention had more positive impact on the final exam scores than departmental exam 1 intervention.
