Today in the afternoon seminar, Berenice raised her confusion about the differences between the major open platforms in the CUNY community. There are indeed quite a few, and many have similar-sounding names, so it’s no doubt a bit confusing. I wanted to write this blog post to clarify the differences between them.
First, we have CUNY Academic Commons. This is a online community space designed for faculty, staff, and students across the CUNY system. It offers tools and resources to create and share content, connect, and collaborate on different projects.
Second, we have the BMCC OpenLab. It’s kind of an Academic Commons but just for BMCC, though some users have taken it in directions that go beyond the functionality of CUNY Academic Commons. In essence, it’s BMCC’s virtual campus; anything that can happen on campus (can) theoretically happen on the OpenLab as well, and we have a great team dedicated to making that transition effective. The OpenLab is where this seminar is of course hosted, and also where the OER @ BMCC Resources Site can be found.
Together, these focus on campus collaboration and community building, but they can also be a place where faculty can design and host their course in a more open manner. Not only are more and more faculty teaching on the OpenLab, but we also have many OER course hubs for different courses, which are sort of like templates or inspiration guides for faculty looking to use more OER/ZTC materials. A list of these finished course hubs can be found here, on OpenEd CUNY, which I will get to…
Third, we have CUNY Academic Works, which is the CUNY-wide Institutional Repository. It provides a platform for preserving and disseminating scholarly and creative works created by the CUNY community. It mostly includes scholarly materials like dissertations or preprints of research articles, but there are also many interesting pedagogical materials, such as Doreen (from the morning seminar)’s Double Entry Journal tool.
Fourth, there is OpenEd CUNY, which is a digital library of open educational resources, providing freely accessible, openly licensed materials that are useful for teaching, learning, and research. This includes textbooks, course materials, and other educational resources. (There may be some overlap with the materials on CUNY Academic Works, which has an OER materials section for each CUNY school.)
Lastly, there is CUNY Pressbooks. Based on the Pressbooks platform used by multiple universities, this is an online book publishing platform that allows CUNY faculty, staff, and students to create, adapt, and share open educational resources, including textbooks. Rachael Nevins, one of the facilitators of the morning seminar, has published with Pressbooks, giving us this wonderful guide for students on finding and using freely licensed images.
So, to summarize, these different platforms cater to different aspects of CUNY academic and community engagement, scholarly communication, and open educational resource sharing. Hopefully this clears things up at least a little bit!
