OER at CCNY

The Evolution of OER at the City College of New York

Introduction

When the OER initiative launched CUNY-wide in 2017, I was approached by the Digital Projects Librarian and the Provost’s Chief of Staff to gauge his interest in converting the First-Year Writing Program, which he directed, to Open Educational Resources. At the time, the college used a commercial textbook. Even though it was freely and inexpensively available, the bootleg version necessarily brought up thorny questions of authorship and ethical responsibility, and the inexpensive version was invariably part of a larger student buy from the bookstore. Amy Hofer (2022), Statewide Open Education Director for Oregon State’s Community Colleges, discovered that 61% of the students who completed her survey did not purchase their textbooks, in part, likely, because of the cost.

While the textbook itself might not have been the main culprit, it added weight to the problem. Finally, and central to my decision to participate in the OER project, the fact that it was impossible to use more than a small fraction of the textbook during one semester demoralized me. The vast bulk of the text went unread and unused. The editorial decision to include multiple routes through the material built in flexibility, but the driving force behind the flexible design was at least as commercial as pedagogical. The main goal was for students to buy the textbook, not to use it.

As a result of staff changes in 2023, the provost’s office approached Tom to see if he would assume leadership of the campus’s OER initiative. Since then, as he developed the already existing OER training seminars, the initiative has expanded its focus from cost saving to cultivating open pedagogy as defined by Catherine Cronin, who distinguishes between open education as “removing specific . . . constraints, eliminating or reducing costs” as well as “transforming the structures themselves, and the relationships between the main actors . . . in order to achieve greater equity” (Cronin, 2019, p. 2).

In this essay, we describe the foundational coursework that the Teaching and Learning Center offers whose purpose is to publicize the concept of open educational resources and open pedagogy and support faculty in the process of adopting open educational resources or who want to convert their courses to OER. These courses serve as feeders to our open publishing initiative. We briefly describe our limited progress in the development and promotion of Z degrees before moving to a focus on a description of the Zine project, which is a part of the OPI but is built with undergraduate student participation–the first project of its kind at CCNY. We follow this section with a description of the Teaching and Learning Center’s operations management–the spine of the operation, the byzantine, multi-faceted system of getting people paid and gathering the data necessary for accurate reporting. This reporting leads, in turn, to our final section on program assessment. Without considerably more focused research, including interviews and surveys, we know little about why faculty adopt and develop OER. Even the growth and expansion in OER that we report in this article is qualified by the instability of definitions and naming conventions. While labels in the university’s registration system change over time and are inconsistently applied by faculty, we can report that the application of ZTC and LTC tags expanded significantly between 2023 and 2025.

OER Seminars at CCNY

When I stepped into the leadership role of the Open Educational Resources initiative at CCNY, I stepped into the solid foundation and programming developed by Digital Scholarship Librarian Ching-Jung Chen, who had directed the program since the grant’s 2017 inception. Professor Chen hosted full-day OER workshops twice a year. She broadcasted open calls for content creation authors, which is the grant’s language for textbook creation.

Course Development and Diversification–CCS, CAS, and UDL+OER

When the OER initiative came into the Teaching and Learning Center in 2023, there were three courses in place:

• The OER Course Conversion Seminar (CCS), which supported faculty who wanted to convert their courses to OER.
• The OER Course Adoption Seminar (CAS), which supported faculty who were about to adopt a department’s already existing OER course.
• The Open Publishing Initiative seminar, which provided textbook authors with an overview of the OER landscape and supported instructors who wanted to create OER textbooks.

While the CC and CA seminars had many strengths, they had over time, particularly in the Covid era move from in-person to online asynchronous, developed internal inconsistencies. A thorough revision and a platform change, from Academic Commons (CUNY’S Wordpress instance) to Brightspace, provided an opportunity to remove the inconsistencies and to place technical accessibility at the center of the course. Technical accessibility–at its most basic, the ability for screen readers to read text–also forms the central focus for intentional assessment of teaching materials.

The structure of the Course Conversion seminar is surprisingly complex. When we revised the course we added the requirement that faculty who complete the course must demonstrate baseline understanding of and fluency with the steps necessary to verify technical accessibility. We also had to define other aspects of “successful completion,” which meant we had to develop a two-tier system of evaluation:

• Tier 1: Completion of the course components–timely discussion board posts and reading responses–and the submission of both an original and revised syllabus.
• Tier 2: All of Tier 1 plus uploading the revised syllabus to Academic Works, the college’s OER repository.

These tiers, though, did not address every scenario. These scenarios are ripped from the headlines of “What Do I Do if Daily”:

• A newly hired adjunct who had never taught the course before and had no original syllabus.
• An adjunct who had been provided with an unalterable standard syllabus.
• An adjunct whose department mistrusted all things OER.
• A departmental syllabus that did not include any course learning outcomes.
• An instructor who wanted to build an OER syllabus, but who would almost certainly never teach the course at CCNY.
• An instructor who was already teaching an OER course.
• An instructor who developed an OER course but did not use a Creative Commons attribution.

In response to these and other issues, we determined that our central mission was to promote better understanding of OER. In this context, success in Tier 1 meant submitting a final OER syllabus that was technically accessible. Because so many courses are taught by contingent labor, and because that labor pool has little control over its schedule, we ignored all of the reasons that would prevent our instructors from actually using the syllabus. In whatever scenario, they would complete our seminar with a better understanding of OER.

In the course revision process, we realized that the Course Conversion seminar had exceeded its boundaries. We were eager to promote not just an OER syllabus, but a syllabus that encompassed key components of universal design for learning such as student engagement and agency. We also wanted the tone of the syllabus to be informed by the guidelines in texts like The Elements of Teaching Writing, which ask us to direct students rather than to make suggestions, and some of the principles of Growth Mindset (Dweck, 2007; Gottschalk & Hjortshoj, 2004), which guides faculty in the development of syllabus and assignment language that supports student success without sacrificing academic rigor. We could not, though, reasonably expect these same adjuncts with their uncertain schedules and futures to have sufficient time to master these pedagogies in addition to our primary focus on the development of technically accessible open educational resources.

We decided to develop a course that introduced or further acquainted instructors with universal design for learning and OER which would culminate in revised assignments that instructors would upload to Academic Works. CUNY Central’s development and distribution of a fully built out universal design for learning course informed this decision. This comprehensive course, designed and built by Jessica Murray at CUNY Central’s Office of Faculty Affairs, addressed every bullet point of each of the nine CAST UDL guidelines. When we offered this course in the fall of 2025, we found it to be too comprehensive for what we could reasonably expect instructors to complete. And though the course design and all of the course assets were excellent, we found ourselves somewhat alienated from the course because we had not made our own videos and our own decisions about what to emphasize in the UDL canon. To address these issues, we spent the Winter 2026 semester revising the course, taking it from nine UDL guidelines to six, and focusing on one or two of the bullet points from each guideline.

The Open Publishing Initiative

From 2023–2025, led by Julia Brown and Janelle Poe, the OPI workshop consisted of six, ninety-minute virtual sessions on the following topics:

• Project Scoping
• Storytelling, Counter-storytelling & Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
• Instructional Design and Universal Design For Learning
• Accessibility
• Publishing Platforms (CUNY Pressbooks & Manifold)
• Wrap up and Getting Started (Poe, 2026)

While these sessions were informative and invigorating, we experienced an extended time to completion and a fairly high rate of attrition. Of the twenty-seven projects launched between fall 2021 and spring 2024, eight have been discontinued. Another seven projects, with start dates from 2022 and 2023, were completed in 2026. The high rate of completion in the 2025–2026 fiscal year appears to be a result of increased, integrated support for OER content creators as we describe later in this text.

Our project status is as follows:

• Projects begun 2021–2024: 27
• Discontinued projects: 8
• Continuing projects: 2
• Completed projects: 17
• Projects completed in two years or less: 10
• Projects completed in three years: 0
• Projects completed in four years: 7

In 2026, the Office of Library Services instituted a narrower frame for content creation projects. Instead of asking instructors to develop an entire textbook, the current model asks them to create a landscape analysis to identify what materials already exist in their field. It also asks them to complete a first, usable chapter. While every course structure has strengths and weaknesses, we are hopeful that this structure will support the development and publication of a higher percentage of usable materials.

The new content creation process also expands the review process. Previously, we either sent blast recruitment emails to the campus or developed individual relationships with faculty who had expressed an interest in content creation. These efforts led to faculty proposals, and these were evaluated by CCNY’s OER team.

In the 2025–2026 iteration, we sent a blast invitation to an in-person only information session. The goal of the in-person session was to begin with an emphasis on commitment (this will be additional work for you) and community (you’ll meet people and have discussions that cannot take place in remote meetings). We distributed proposal applications to the attendees and workshopped proposals with authors before they submitted them to the Office of Library Services. OLS was able to be a part of the review process, which broke us out of the insular loop in which we had been operating. And because we’ve been offering the CAS, CCS, and UDL seminars on a regular basis, most of the applications came from people who had already completed one or more of these courses.

In addition, the new process clearly outlines both expectations and a timeline. These expectations both help motivate the content creators and streamline our project’s relationship to the campus’s Budget Office. The funds that we receive for this first phase of content creation are only available for that academic year. Creators who do not complete their projects in the first year will not expect to be supported for the same project the next year.

What does it take to get OER authors over the finish line?

When I joined the OER initiative at CCNY, there were about a dozen OER textbook projects in various stages of completion, several of which had been in progress for over three years. My task was to resolve as many of these projects as possible by the end of the fiscal year. “Resolve,” in this case, means either 1) help the authors actually complete their book (preferable); or, 2) let the authors know that we’re sunsetting their project.

The reasons that the projects had stalled, in my estimation, were manifold. Prior to the current structure of the OER content creation grants, and the current structure of the CCNY OER Initiative, authors were loosely expected to complete an entire open textbook, but it wasn’t possible to have inflexible expectations around how quickly the project would or should progress. Some authors finished complete textbooks within a year, but typically these authors were building the book directly off of pre-existing course materials and teaching notes. Other projects involved the drafting of substantial new material, the creation of multimedia learning assets, the coordination of several co-authors, or events beyond the author’s control: family emergencies, unexpected changes to teaching assignments, the advent of a full-time job, or the reorganization of the college.

Once the initial one-year deadline passed, but—for reasons of the college’s financial bureaucracy—the possibility of receiving funding for finishing the project remained open, the question became, so when is it due? The further the project start-dates faded into the authors’ rearview mirrors, and the more concrete deadlines they accumulated for their many other projects, the more the OER textbooks became something that they would get to someday, when they had more time. Of course, life happens as well, and peoples’ priorities change, but my perception is that—for the most part—these projects had been put on their various backburners and left to sizzle away until the bottom of the pot was a solid crusty mass.

To reawaken these projects, I introduced myself to all of the authors and asked them to let me know if they still wanted to finish, with a clear deadline by which to respond. Some of them said yes, at which point I moved forward with the process below. Interestingly, no one responded saying that they were not going to finish their project—every project that was sunset was sunset because the author(s) did not respond to multiple rounds of follow-up communications. In the end, five projects received a kind note thanking them for the work that they had done so far, informing them that we were sunsetting the project, and inviting them to apply for funding again in a future cycle.

For the authors who did want to continue, the process of getting them over the finish line very much resembles the best practices for project-based learning:

Set an achievable goal

As the years went by, many of the projects had significantly ballooned in scope within the authors’ minds. Through consultations, I was able to work with some of the authors for whom this was true and re-scale the project to something that was meaningful to them, useful for students, and achievable by the end of the fiscal year. We shifted the definition of a finished project to mean not just something that was complete as the author intended it to be, but a usable project—a project that could still be developed but was already complete, even if limited in scale. This shift was a significant milestone in the direction of open pedagogy because it disconnected “publication” and/or “textbook” from the product that a student picks up off a shelf or orders online–a more or less stable, complete, print or digital artifact that promises to anticipate every crucial disciplinary scenario. Support for the creation of narrower projects encourages a nimbler relationship between educational materials, instructors, and students, as it reflects a just-in-time approach to education rather than a market driven approach.

Set intermittent benchmarks and deadlines

As with all big projects, completing a textbook is too complicated of a task to put on your to-do list. The authors and I worked together to lay out all of the sub-tasks that needed to be completed, and deadlines by which they needed to be completed, in order to finish the project. Some authors wanted these deadlines in a table in a Google doc, others wanted to plug them directly into their calendar apps, still others wanted everything written out in an email that they would keep in their inbox. Whatever the format, the tasks were much the same: draft each chapter, respond to copyedits for each chapter, upload the book to Pressbooks, gather and organize images and attribution data, upload images, and complete final accessibility checks.

What’s more, prior to my appointment in this role, this kind of support had been distributed across multiple staff members. Tom would, for example, let authors know that a deadline was coming up. If he heard back from an author, he’d then put them in touch with the OER fellow overseeing their project. But, because that fellow was inevitably occupied with multiple other jobs, including dissertating, teaching, providing consultations in the Teaching and Learning Center, or something else, it might be a week or two before OER fellow followed up. The author, in turn, would not respond immediately to the OER fellow, so three or four weeks could go by without any movement on the project. In the initial set-up, the OER fellows would provide OER training and move directly from that role into author support. But, if the project foundered or was delayed, it was all but impossible to regain that sense of momentum and excitement. Having one person who was not overloaded with multiple jobs streamlined the process.

Provide editorial, technical, and moral support

Each author needed slightly different support to complete their projects. Some needed a monthly or bi-weekly check-in meeting to talk through their status and questions, some needed frequent check-in emails, some needed me to tag them directly in documents. They all needed technical support with Pressbooks and digital accessibility, which is a subfield of expertise in and of itself. Underlying all of this support was a certain infusion of enthusiasm on my part. After languishing for so long, it seemed to me that some of the authors had lost the spark that made them want to create the book in the first place. I am not, constitutionally, a cheerleader, but the authors have told me that a steady drum of this is useful, this is helpful, this is a worthwhile project, went a long way.

Staff time

It goes without saying that all of these steps required a non-negligible time commitment on my part: time to write dozens of emails, time to read and copyedit chapters, time to meet, time to learn the intricacies of Pressbooks and digital accessibility and apply them, time uploading images and cross-checking the approximately 19,000 pieces of information required for each image, and on and on. Spending this time was made possible by being compensated, of course, as well as being relatively sheltered from the other things that tend to take up time in academic life—I wasn’t teaching, I wasn’t on any committees, I wasn’t supposed to be working on four different writing projects. I was just supporting authors. I’ve had a few roles in academia, and I’ve observed many of them, and it seems to me that the laser-focused nature of the OER Project Manager—as I started calling myself at some point—is unique and worth replicating if there’s something that you really want to get done.

Z Degrees and Publicity

We have also identified eight Z degrees and, returning to relationships, are working with individual departments and Academic Advising to publicize and support these. In some cases, department leadership was not aware that Z degrees were available to their students. As a part of our effort to promote a culture of open pedagogy, we will begin working more consistently with department leadership to guide them through the necessary steps of establishing a Z degree, including offering enough ZTC courses every semester to provide students with at least a narrow path to a Z degree. Departments also need to highlight this option on their home pages, and the advising team needs to be aware of these degrees and to have confidence that they will be reliably available over the several years.

The Zine Project

Zine-topia: Understanding the World Builders of City College is a hybrid digital and print archive that documents, curates, and amplifies student-created zines from the Worldmaking: Introduction to Humanities and Arts course at City College of New York (CUNY). Edited by Isabella Tecson and me, the project centers the creative work of working-class New York City students whose voices are often underrepresented in academic and cultural spaces.

The project will feature a curated selection of student zines alongside artist statements, interviews, and pedagogical materials that contextualize the course’s emphasis on “world-making” as both a creative and critical practice. By pairing visual storytelling with reflections from students, teaching assistants, and course creator Professor Marit Dewhurst, the archive will illuminate how interdisciplinary arts education fosters community at CUNY. Zine-topia will exist as both a public-facing website hosted on CUNY Academic Commons and a print zine publication, ensuring accessibility across digital and physical formats. In its long-term vision, the project aims to expand into an open educational resource (OER), including teaching guides, a broader CUNY-wide zine archive, and potentially multimedia components such as filmed interviews.

A core component of the project is the involvement of student editors from CCNY, whose familiarity with the course and campus community ensures that editorial decisions remain collaborative with the students whose work is being archived. As peers, student editors are uniquely positioned to recognize the cultural, social, and personal contexts that shape these zines, helping preserve the nuance of the work while avoiding the institutional distance that can accompany traditional archival practices. Their participation transforms the archive into a collaborative space of knowledge production rather than simply a repository of student work. In addition to strengthening the archive’s authenticity, serving as a student editor provides valuable experience in editing, digital publishing, and archival practice for emerging scholars and creators. By positioning students as editors rather than only contributors, the project reflects the Worldmaking course’s commitment to community-centered learning. This is also a great opportunity for CCNY students to add editorial experience to their resumes.

The development of the Zine project contributes significantly to our move toward open pedagogy. As Cronin (2019) writes, “examples of open pedagogy include working together with students to use, adapt, and create OER . . .” (p. 7).

Operations

Operations–moving people through the multiple pipelines necessary to get them paid–is the backbone of CCNY’s OER initiative. As both Abby and Afsana describe, and as is evident in the discussion of the Z degree, considerable relationship building goes into every aspect of our OER project. Our goal is not only to create open education materials, but also to foster networks of open pedagogy–entire departments and even divisions of the college moving open pedagogy to the center of their missions–and we hope to gradually have an impact on campus culture. No one aspect of this project is more important than operations, and none of them are possible without it.

An Achilles heel of any faculty development project is payment–nothing is more undermining, less inclined to shift campus culture, than a well-executed project for which faculty are not paid in a reasonably timely manner. As Cronin (2019) notes, the “creation of open educational resources . . . relies heavily on institutional resources and the appropriation of academic labor” (p. 5). The institutional resource upon which we rely most heavily is what we’re calling here operations–the vast network required to hire and pay all of our OER participants.

Operations Is People Work

Operations is all the stuff that has to happen behind the scenes, so people actually get paid for the work they do, and to make sure the faculty and staff are empowered to accomplish their goals. The main thing I’ve learned doing this is that operations aren’t really about paperwork (it’s also definitely not, not about paperwork either). It’s about people. The forms matter, but the forms only make sense when the relationships behind them are working and make sense. Everything can be stressful, so the relationships we build along the way serve as methods for making it all that much easier to handle, but they also act as a way to lessen the blows.

What It Takes to Pay One Person

The systems themselves are complicated. To pay one person, we might need a New Hire Package, a Multiple Position Form, and a Personnel Action Form. Some of them need to be signed by administrators in the faculty member’s home department; all of them have to go through HR, plus extra documents for our international students and faculty, plus multiple-position faculty and faculty who don’t know that they’re multiple-position faculty, and so on. A lot of our participants are adjuncts who are already teaching somewhere else, so there’s a cap on the hours they can be paid for, and sometimes we just have to wait and pay them in a later semester. None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s just how a big institution works. It can be a lot of “fun,” though if by “fun” we mean not fun.

Knowing a Person, Not an Inbox

So the thing that’s actually made a difference isn’t a better form or a faster system. It’s the relationships I’ve built with the people who run those systems. In my first year as the administrative specialist, I’ve gotten to know the people in HR and in Time and Leave. This has changed everything. Instead of sending paperwork off into a void and hoping it comes back, I can reach out to a specific person, ask what’s holding things up, and figure out together how to move it along. I sat down for a long Zoom meeting with the head of hourly payments and we went through our various issues one by one, and I’ve fielded a lot of calls since then. Now I’ve got actual contacts at a few different offices instead of just a general inbox. We’re building that same kind of relationship with the International Students office right now, so we can understand how their process works and make it smoother for us, for faculty, and for that office too. Almost every one of these connections started out as a problem and turned into a person I can actually call.

We’re Not the Only Ones Struggling

This is all important because the reality is we aren’t the only ones struggling. The HR office that handles hourly payments is understaffed, too, just like we are. It’s arguable they’re more understaffed given what they’re required to accomplish. Most of the holdups we run into aren’t because anybody is careless. They’re the result of a whole chain of hardworking people trying to keep an overburdened system going. Once I started seeing it that way, I had a lot more patience and empathy. So a lot of the things I push for on our end, like giving HR an earlier heads up about our projects and getting our paperwork clean and early instead of at the last minute, I do as much to make their lives easier as to make ours run better. Making things easier for them makes things easier for us, which makes things easier for faculty. Administrative offices need those relationships and camaraderie too, just like faculty benefit from cohorts where they can collaborate and commiserate. Building a relationship isn’t just about getting what you need from someone. It’s understanding that they’re struggling through their own version of the same stuff, and then going, “Oh yeah, that does suck for you too, huh?”

Walking Faculty Through It

The same goes for the faculty. A big part of operations is communicating, going back and forth with people. It’s making sure everyone knows what they need to do and by when. Faculty are busy. They miss emails. They aren’t always sure which form is which. They aren’t always sure why HR needs one more signature. They’re juggling their teaching and their own deadlines and a confusing payment process on top of all that. Remembering that makes me a better person to work with (I hope). I’ve learned this understanding isn’t natural to everyone, but in my opinion, it is the largest barrier between good interactions and bad ones. My job is to walk them through it and follow up so nobody falls through the cracks at the last step. I get in touch, find out what happened, and work with HR to still find a way to get them paid. Most of the time it works out because by now everyone involved knows we’re all trying to get to the same place.

Why I Built the Tracking Sheet

Operations is also a mountain of paperwork, with a different process for every situation, and timelines, and receipts, and the need to keep a clear history of all of it. I realized quickly that you can’t keep all that in your head. It’s possible that’s just me, but on the off chance it’s not, I’ve spent a lot of time learning Excel and Google Sheets to help make the job easier for everyone. I’m still learning. I use our department’s tracking sheet to keep all of it in one place, like who’s in each cohort, who’s been paid and who hasn’t, the exceptions, the dates, who still owes a document and when it comes in, and notes on every complication. That sheet has been integral to all the communication I’ve been talking about. When HR asks where someone stands, or a faculty member asks what they still need to do, the answer is right there. So, a big part of the job is thinking ahead like this and finding solutions that make the whole process less random.

The Payoff of Doing It Ahead of Time

This year really tested all of that, and I found myself looking down hours of work only to realize, “Wait, I think I can do this in five minutes with the Google Sheets records!”. No better feeling. That wasn’t really a paperwork win. It was the payoff of doing the monotonous work ahead of time. Do I often forget to update the sheet? Yes. But it helps. The smaller stuff works the same way. Every wrong rate, reopened timesheet, or lost form got fixed because somebody on the other end was willing to pick up the phone and sort it out with me, and because I could quickly provide the relevant information for them.

The Human Side of Open Systems

It’s easy to talk about openness as an idea and forget that these systems and processes are run by real people. OER is great. The vision itself is great. Free materials, knowledge shared. But the systems we have and the support we have aren’t always up to par. The only way to make it all work is to build the human connections that the forms don’t account for, and to do it with some understanding for everyone else who’s stretched just as thin (and often thinner). It’s relationship work, and thinking ahead, and the foundation is in understanding. Knowing you aren’t the only one struggling, and that the way through is to make each other’s jobs a little easier.

Assessment

OER assessment is complex. Primarily, we would like to know what impact the availability of OER materials has on our students, but a research project of this scale is beyond our means. Nicholas Colvard et al. (2018) report the “results of a large-scale study (21,822 students) regarding the impact of course-level faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER)”:

While the results of this and many other studies justify the continuation of the OER project in New York state, we would like to know more about the impact of our initiative on CCNY students and faculty. Our interest does not stem from a belief in our exceptionalism, but rather from an interest in using local assessment to inform local practice. At a foundational level, we can attest to the fact that every instructor who completes our course has been led through and asked to perform accessibility checks on all of their materials. We confirm accessibility before instructors upload their materials to Academic Works or, if their project will not be uploaded, before they are paid. Our position is that accessible materials benefit every student, and our hope is that instructors apply their understanding of accessibility to all of their materials as they continue in their careers.

While we have not tried any specific method to expand the number and disciplinary range of ZTC courses, CUNY’s Textbook Cost Audit report suggests that the disciplinary range has expanded. Below we include a summary of textbook cost data tables that compares 2023 and 2025 ZTC and LTC offerings and disciplinary distribution. For a more detailed breakdown of this information, please visit the CCNY Teaching and Learning Center website. Having not conducted any surveys or focus groups, we cannot take responsibility for these changes.

While we find these numbers encouraging, we also note here that many courses, including Art, Theater, and Speech, and some lab and thesis courses were likely ZTC/LTC courses before the tag existed in our databases, so there is no evidence here that a course converted from commercial to open educational materials. In the absence of more research, we can only speculate that there is greater faculty awareness of the ZTC and LTC tags and there might be a concurrent rising awareness of open pedagogy. Whatever the cause, we can also confirm that ZTC and LTC courses were more widespread in 2025 than they were in 2023.

To ensure transparency as required by OEP guidelines, authors disclose that the statistical evaluations of textbook-status breakdowns and departmental shifts in the subsequent tables and analyses were generated using an Artificial Intelligence tool, Microsoft Copilot (2023). The methodology we used to verify the LLM’s summary is on our website. The verification process revealed no errors.

Conclusion

Taken together the various spokes on the wheel of CCNY’s OER project–Course Conversion, Course Adoption, and UDL seminars; the Open Publishing Initiative, and the Zine Project (part of the OPI, but unique in its inclusion of student perspectives), constitute a solid foundation for CCNY’s OER initiative. We publicize the seminars to the entire campus, including staff and administration, without regard to rank or job title on the theory that regular publicity helps establish the OER initiative as a part of the culture at CCNY. The project has been in place in various iterations for ten years. Time and consistency contribute to a sense of permanence, we hope, and consistent offerings on a regular schedule align our seminar with the course schedule available to students.

References