Tonight I watched the Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Creating Community While Building an Early College Humanities OER” with Paul Ricciardi, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, and Michelle Turnbull, adjunct at Kingsborough Community College. They told the story of how they created an Early College Humanities OER. Turnbull taught high school English for fourteen years. Kingsborough offers humanities courses to high school students. They start co-coordinating this class before the pandemic. Kingsborough Community College is part of the City University of New York system with an extremely diverse student body with a lot of international students and many in low-income homes or first-generation students. I knew a little about this institution from ASM connections but I didn’t realize the extent of students that commute and take courses for low tuition. Students can take weekend courses too. Instructors faced an additional challenge during the pandemic: no funds for textbooks. They found out about OER and decided to find an OER text for their course… and didn’t find one! Ricciardi mentioned that there is an introduction to theatre arts text that is OER. Their course is focused on 1900 onward and they needed a specific text. Kingsborough Community College does have an OER Coordinator and some financial support. Ricciardi and Turnbull were not alone: they had four other instructors too that helped with the process. Each one took a chapter of the book and with Turnbull’s organization, began creating a new textbook. They then searched for OER on their topics and found “a generosity of spirit” according to Ricciardi, of resources. Turnbull mentioned that citations for the artwork were a challenge because not everything was in the public domain. It seems to be a very art-heavy course and Turnbull talked about how “humbling” it was to work on alt text. They then showed the final project. The OER lives on a CUNY system website. They demonstrated how their OER takes students on a journey across several decades and includes images to reinforce the learning from text. Their OER is being downloaded in other countries. Their next steps include piloting the text with more instructors in the Humanities and uploading it after improving to Manifold so it becomes more interactive. Their takeaway was: “if we can do it, so can you!” It was a fun session and provided more motivation to create BIT 295 and MetMod texts.
