Simple   Scalable   Sustainable

Since launching our Open Educational Resources (OER) project as an affordability initiative in 2017, the A&S Office of Teaching Excellence & Innovation has been guided by the Three S’s: Simple, Scalable, Sustainable. Our OERs provide learning materials to thousands of students each semester, so they must be stable, meet accessibility standards, and allow instructors flexibility and choice in their courses. 

To meet these needs, we’ve developed an approach that relies on partnership and collaboration. We work with editorial committees in departments and programs to collect, curate, and vet the content, and we work with our NYU IT and Libraries partners to provide expertise and infrastructure for distribution and support. 

Simple 

Building blocks:  We focus on collections of learning objects that instructors can contextualize within their own customized course narratives. Traditional textbooks privilege a single organizational approach to material that instructors must either follow, sample from, or work against. A political science course with a unit on data science is better served by a collection of Jupyter notebooks than an entire R textbook, just as instructors in a global visual cultures course will find a traditional art history textbook more problematic than helpful. 

We rely on basic technologies and standards to ensure portability, such as spreadsheets and pdfs, and we use open source platforms whenever possible. 

Scalable

Curation not Authoring: Our projects focus on committee-curated rather than specially authored content. We’ve found that when more instructors are involved in the creation of resources, more instructors adopt them.

The content of our OERs is built in simple “databases” -- eg spreadsheets or Github directories  -- and deployed to a variety of presentation layers, such as Wordpress sites, Zotero folders, or LMS sites. Using templates and CSV uploaders, we can populate a 3000+ item textbook in under an hour. 

Sustainable

Platform agnostic: The database approach to content creation and storage means that our textbook replacements can easily shift presentation layers, allowing instructors to take immediate advantage of new technologies.  

Metadata driven: Our collections are unified by a standard set of descriptions created by the faculty editorial committee and aligned with existing standards where possible to promote sharing and interoperability. This approach streamlines the editorial process, allowing collections to grow and change with curricular needs.