CUNY Open Platforms for Open Pedagogy During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic

Presenters

Wendy Barrales, Manifold Graduate Fellow, GC Digital Initiatives, CUNY Graduate Center
Matthew K. Gold, Director, GC Digital Initiatives, Associate Professor of English/Digital Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center
Laurie Hurson, Open Educational Technologist, Teaching & Learning Center, CUNY Graduate Center
Robin Miller, Open Educational Technologist, GC Digital Initiatives, CUNY Graduate Center
Luke Waltzer, Director, Teaching & Learning Center, CUNY Graduate Center

Abstract

Over the past three years, a team from the CUNY Graduate Center has extended and refined an infrastructure to support open and digital pedagogy at CUNY. The CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold support and facilitate faculty uses of open educational resources (OER) across the 25 campus CUNY system, helping faculty integrate experiential learning and multimedia into teaching while also creating opportunities to foster student digital literacy through use of open tools. All of this work across the system has been supported by the CUNY Office of Library Services.

In Spring 2020, as New York City became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, the university transitioned to fully online teaching and learning. During and since this transition, the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold platforms have played key roles in providing faculty with CUNY-built and administered platforms that support remote instruction and foster the use of open educational resources and open pedagogical teaching strategies. Faculty and staff have created and taught with open texts on Manifold, hosted fully online and blended synchronous/asynchronous courses on the Commons, and have used both platforms as vehicles for thinking through how best to teach and support students during these times.

This presentation will introduce the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold platforms and highlight examples of OER use and open pedagogy. We will share how these platforms have supported fully online teaching and learning throughout the pandemic, and lessons learned that will be carried forward into the future. We’ll also take time to reflect upon how the challenges of the past year have impacted our strategies
for support, and talk more broadly about the implications for open infrastructure in the massive shift towards online instruction.