All current Kingsborough faculty are welcome to join us for our Open Education Faculty Interest Group meetings. Meetings are held three times per semester and explore different aspects of and strategies for Open Education.

For the Fall 2021 semester, meetings are scheduled for:

• Friday, October 8, 2021 from 12pm – 1pm
• Monday, November 8, 2021 from 2pm – 3pm
• Thursday, December 9, 2021 from 12pm – 1pm

Meeting #1: Friday, October 8, 2021 from 12pm – 1pm

Topics Discussed:

• Introductions
  • General Experience with Open Education
  • Previous Work with Open Assignments
• Differing Perceptions of what constitutes Open Educational Practices.
  • Open Educational Resources, Open Pedagogy, and Open Education
• Creating and Implementing Wikipedia Assignments through WikiEdu.
  • Previous attempts at Wiki editing assignments in Information Literacy and Theatre Arts.
• Open Education as Social Justice and Equity Practice.
  • referenced readings by Robin DeRosa, Rajiv Jhangiani and Jesse Stommel
• Sample Open Education Platforms: Hypothes.is, Manifold, CUNY Academic Commons, etc.
  • Incorporating these platforms into courses.
  • How platforms differ from one another and compliment one another.

Meeting #2: Monday, November 8, 2021 from 2pm – 3pm

Topics Discussed:

How are faculty incorporating open education into their classes:

• The success of the BIO 33 OER lab manual
• Open Education as an issue related to social justice and equity
• Encouraging faculty to think about the range of open educational strategies, including but not restricted to OER.
• How faculty are incorporating assignments from the Open Pedagogy Fellowship and how students can (and are) creating content for one another.
• Since open education is new to a lot of our students, faculty discussed the importance of scaffolding assignments and explaining the rationale of open education to students.
• Faculty also reflected on how we might create open work with students and the CUNY Academic Commons, and how that can be regenerative from semester to semester for a given course.
• As a follow-up to Ryan’s open education meeting with the Provost, the group discussed the option of creating a faculty open education showcase. We will discuss this further at our next meeting.
• Connection between open education and high-impact practices.
• Ivana Espinet from the Education Program shared her process of creating and executing an Open Assignment for one of her courses.
• We discussed the various levels of open licensing and Creative Commons attributes. Faculty expressed an interest in having a session specifically about copyright and creative commons licensing.
• Next meeting will be held toward the beginning of December.

Meeting #3: Friday, December 9, 2021 from 12pm – 1pm

Topics Discussed:

How can we expand or strengthen Open Education at Kingsborough:

• Emphasizing Open Education as an issue of access, equity and social justice.
• Offer additional opportunities for faculty/staff development in the area of OER.
• Faculty discussed the varying definitions of, and understandings of, Open Education, Open Pedagogy, Open Educational Resources, Zero textbook Cost, etc.
• After discussing the above three topics, the remainder of the meeting was spent discussing and envisioning what an Open Education Faculty Showcase might look like.
• FIG members discussed the need for a two-day event, in the afternoons, where faculty could showcase work and where trainings could also be offered.
• Tentative Dates: May 4-5, 2022
• Day #1 will include a keynote, followed by open education faculty development.
• Day #2 will include an afternoon showcasing faculty work.
• A showcase committee/working group will be formed at the start of the spring semester.
• The meeting concluded with possible FIG topics for next semester. It was recommended that each FIG meeting have a theme or central topic so if needed, faculty can choose which meetings to attend.
• A Doodle Poll will be sent out to determine the dates for Spring 2022.