An assignment and lesson plan for collaborative brainstorming exercises enabling students to collectively articulate their own goals. Framing instruction and assessment with their own goals centers students and can also make it easier to deemphasize grades.

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is a multidisciplinary Open Educational Resource that showcases ekphrastic poems in the public domain alongside the artworks that inspired them. Collections of resources about each poem and the associated artwork both complement and supplement the poems. Resources include biographical information about the poet, and the artist where applicable, as well as articles, videos, audio files, presentations, and podcasts illuminating the historical significance of each work of literature and piece of art.

This workshop bridges the concepts of equity (broadly conceived) and accessibility, treating them as related and intersecting. Its intention is to increase our collective and individual capacity to become more equity and accessibility-minded educators: especially in the online classroom, where existing inequity and a lack of accessibility can sometimes be magnified, but which is also a place that can offer new forms of engagement and connection.

What do we mean by “open” teaching? And how does “open” relate to “digital pedagogy”? This workshop will introduce the foundations of open digital pedagogy and provide examples from The CUNY Academic Commons, a WordPress teaching and learning platform used by faculty in a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses across CUNY.

This handout provides a brief overview of open access to scholarly literature. It looks at the problems with traditional journal publishing, the promise of open access as a solution, and the different paths to open access.

Reading Mediations is an interactive, web-based guide for teaching and learning critical online reading skills. Best used with high school or college students, it includes a selection of critical reading tools and verification resources, guided readings, and structured learning activities. It also presents opportunities for independent exploration and critique of the online news and information ecosystem, with live content provided through Twitter and several news websites.
The guiding principle of Reading Mediations is that the epidemic of misinformation, propaganda, and poor journalism online cannot be eradicated by fact-checking tools alone. It must begin with us, the readers. Learning first about how we consume information, and then learning how to do so in a savvy, responsible, and self-aware manner, readers will be better equipped to absorb and share what they engage with online as critical thinkers. Published on the Scalar platform, Reading Mediations takes advantage of the networked environment in which we read, both to model best practices and to provide users with direct experience. The guide's readings are organized in a semi-structured but non-linear way––not only because this is how we tend to read online, but also because reading in a networked manner can help us navigate and evaluate the surfeit of information available.
Access Reading Mediations: here: http://readingmediations.memoriamundi.org/education/reading-mediations/index

This is a syllabus for a mixed MA/PhD level course, "Equity, Elitism, and Public Higher Education," taught in Spring 2021 at the Graduate Center by Matt Brim and Katina Rogers.
Higher education can be a powerful engine of equity and social mobility. Yet many of the structures of colleges and universities—including admissions offices, faculty hiring committees, disciplinary formations, institutional rankings, and even classroom pedagogies and practices of collegiality—rely on tacit values of meritocracy and an economy of prestige. For public universities like CUNY this tension can be especially problematic, as structurally-embedded inequities undermine the institution’s democratizing mission and values. It is no surprise that normative institutional structures correspond with normative formulations of sexuality, class, race, and gender such that sociocultural biases are built into the academy. This correspondence governs what counts as valuable intellectual work, and in doing so, it also overdetermines where and how and to whom resources accrue in the university. In other words, many academic structures actually undermine the values that we associate with possibilities for the most challenging and productive and diverse academic life.
In this course, we examine the purposes and principles of universities, especially public universities; consider whether various structures advance or undermine those goals; and imagine new possibilities for educational systems that weave equity into the fabric of all they do.

Extensive help documentation for how to teach a course using the CUNY Academic Commons.

In this workshop, attendees will be introduced to the notions of active learning and classroom engagement through the possible incorporation of online polls into classroom activities. We will discuss those concepts, view examples, talk about uses and possibilities both for in-person and online classes. There are different online tools, including Survey Monkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/), Poll Everywhere (https://www.polleverywhere.com/), Mentimeter (https://www.mentimeter.com/), Participoll (https://www.participoll.com/), Sli-do(https://www.sli.do/), and most can be used via integration into PowerPoint slides or through student cell phone access to mobile applications. These platforms provide multiple forms of interaction and, more important, instant feedback, which allows faculty to engage with student perspectives immediately.

This workshop, courtesy of the PublicsLab at the Graduate Center, offers three videos: a “crash course” approach to audio/video production; a primer on “Camera Angles and Lighting Techniques” and “Advanced Audio Methods & Pedagogy.”