CCNY Open Educational Resources

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CCNY Open Educational Resources and Other TLC Programs

City College of New York (CCNY) Open Educational Resources (OER) are free, openly licensed teaching and learning materials available to faculty and students. Supported by CUNY and state initiatives, CCNY’s OER program helps reduce textbook costs while enhancing access to high-quality educational content.

Key Features:

  • Free for students: No-cost alternatives to expensive textbooks.
  • Flexible and customizable: Instructors can adapt OER to fit their course needs.
  • Improves equity: Removes financial barriers and ensures all students have access to materials from day one.

Support available: The CCNY Libraries and TLC OER team assist with finding, creating, and integrating OER into courses. Check out some projects we've offered below.

Ongoing TLC Initiatives

The UDL+OER initiative is built on the UDL course developed by Jessica Murray at CUNY’s Office of Faculty Affairs. It combines this course with the OER Course Conversion workshop that has been in place at CCNY since 2017. To learn more, click through to the full description! If you have any questions, please send us an email at tlc@ccny.cuny.edu .

Universal Design for Learning. UDL is a comprehensive framework of tools and techniques educators can use to encourage active and engaged learning through course design and teaching methods. This course will help you

  • Develop an ongoing accessibility practice;
  • Understand the rationale for the UDL framework and its connection to disability and educational technology;
  • Gain a better understanding of social-emotional learning, student motivation, social inclusion, barriers to learning, and assessment as a tool for learning; and
  • Develop flexible teaching and learning environments that acknowledge and accept learner variability as opposed to traditional teaching methods that favor single modes of learning and assessment.

The Open Publishing Initiative includes five, 1.5‑hour remote seminars, which will be attended by all members of the current OPI cohort. These seminars will introduce you to various aspects of OER publishing, including project scoping and design, Creative Commons licensing, digital platforms, and the pedagogical principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as well as Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (IDE)

OER Course Conversion Cohorts

The OER initiative at the City College of New York (CCNY) aims to increase education affordability by lowering textbook costs for students and supporting the use and creation of freely available educational materials on campus. We train instructors across departments to develop OER courses as well as provide technical assistance on building open course sites.

Our funding comes primarily from the OER Scale Up Initiative, a grant from New York State launched in 2017 to fund the growth of OER on CUNY campuses. CCNY is a leader within CUNY's OER community.

The CUNY OER Initiative award only covers undergraduate courses that require readings/textbooks. Studio courses and thesis courses, all graduate courses, and any courses that do not have a required textbook are not eligible. Instructors who have already completed CCNY’s OER workshop are not eligible. 

Note: The purpose of the OER initiative is to reduce textbook costs, but the project also supports instructors who want to increase their use of open educational resources in a course that is already designated zero textbook cost (ZTC). The before and after syllabi must show evidence of considerable revision to assigned reading materials for instructors to qualify for the stipend. The evaluation of “considerable revision” will be made by the OER course facilitators. 

Course Requirements

Instructors who complete the OER training will receive $1,000 when they have: 

  • Signed and returned a letter of intent.
  • Completed the assignments in the course conversion workshop, including posting to the discussion boards, by the due dates.
  • Attended at least one of the two scheduled synchronous Zoom meetings (16 and 23 at 4:00).
  • Submitted their current syllabus to the Course Conversion Seminar course site in Brightspace.
  • Submitted a revised, technically accessible* syllabus. 

Instructors who convert their courses to OER will receive an additional $1,000 when they have:

  • Met with an OER fellow to support the revision process and to review the revised syllabus.
  • Submitted the technically accessible, OER syllabus to Academic Works (CCNY’s OER repository) by June 30th, 2026.

*"Technically accessible" means accessible for assistive devices.

There is an OER payment cap of $2,100 per instructor. 

Open Education Resource Submissions
CCNY Open Press Initiative
OPI Textbook Submissions

CCNY accepts between three and five OER textbook projects every year. These texts are free of charge to everyone. Faculty who create an OER textbook with the Teaching and Learning Center will receive $10,000. We encourage faculty to submit their textbook proposals to us by emailing   tlc@ccny.cuny.edu  . Faculty members accepted into our Open Press Initiative program complete a five-session synchronous introduction to open educational resource practices and pedagogy. Following this introductory course, they work with an OER Fellow who provides both technological and pedagogical support until the project is complete. Project completion generally takes between one and three years.

Z Degress

Students in some majors are able to earn a Z degree, which means that at least one section of every required course in their major subject is designated ZTC. These courses have to be offered with enough frequency that a student would reasonably be able to complete a degree in four years. Departments that offered Z degrees as of September 2024 include: 

Last Updated: 01/21/2026 09:07