As our OE Week ’24 coverage continues, let’s take a look at Touro’s OER Faculty Fellowship!
The Library’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Faculty Fellowship helps guide faculty through the process of selecting, adapting, or creating OER for use in their classes, instead of using expensive commercial textbooks. This fellowship has been the primary driver of OER use at Touro University for the past three years.
In January, we officially closed the book on our 2023 fellowship. This was an exciting year for the fellowship, as we had 9 faculty fellows, our largest cohort yet! This cohort includes faculty from Touro University New York’s undergraduate and graduate programs, Touro Law Center, Touro University Nevada, Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, and Touro’s Physician Assistant program. Their completed OER projects will all be published on Touro Scholar’s Open Touro-created resources page.
Congratulations to the 9 OER Fellows from 2023 for completing the 6-month fellowship and developing OER for use in their classes!
Meet our 2023 cohort of OER Faculty Fellows below:
It’s that time of year again… Open Education Week! This week, all week, schools and organizations all over the world are taking the opportunity to share the latest developments & achievements in Open Education.
Touro University Libraries, in collaboration with The Office of the Provost, is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Touro University Open Educational Resources (OER) Faculty Fellowship. This fellowship awards faculty a stipend of $500 to develop OER for use in their courses. At the end of the fellowship, the fellows’ OER projects will be published on Touro Scholar and in public OER repositories. Our 2023 OER fellows are:
Gena Bardwell, MFA Director, General Education Chair and Assistant Professor, Speech and Communication Touro University NY, NYSCAS
David Nussbaum, MA Assistant Professor, Speech and Communication Touro University NY, NYSCAS
Michelle Buccinna, OTD, OTR/L Director, Long Island Campus, Occupational Therapy MS Assistant Professor, Occupational Therapy MS Touro University NY, School of Health Sciences
Regina Burch, AB, MSA, JD Interim Assistant Dean for Academic Excellence and Bar Success Visiting Professor of Law Touro Law Center
Stephanie Klinesmith, MS Instructor of Anatomy and Neuroanatomy Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, Middletown
Jacqueline Randa, PT, DPT, PhD, NCS, OCS Assistant Professor, School of Physical Therapy Touro University Nevada
Deborah Ratti, PhD Assistant Professor, Sociology Touro University NY, NYSCAS
Tom Rozinski, JD, MA Associate Professor and Deputy Chair for Lander College for Men Department of Political Science Touro University NY
James Van Rhee, MS, PA-C Associate Professor and Chair of Assessment and Remediation PA Program Touro University
The Library is pleased to introduce our second cohort of faculty fellows! These three Touro instructors recently completed the Touro University Open Educational Resources Faculty Fellowship, presented by Touro Libraries in collaboration with the Office of the Provost. The fellowship has been successful in lowering the cost of education for our students and filling subject gaps, providing open educational materials in disciplines where they were previously lacking, like Health Sciences and Law.
Welcome to our series recognizing champions of free and affordable course materials at Touro! These “Textbook Heroes” have made a difference in the lives of our students by lowering the cost of their degrees. Do you know someone who fits the bill? Nominate them (or yourself) by contacting the Libraries.
Dr. Bigel has partnered with Touro Libraries to publish a series of peer-reviewed open textbooks on the Pressbooks platform. Introduction to Financial Analysis, the first book in the series is available here.
Who are you? Tell us more about you and the course you teach.
I am a former Wall Street executive who did stints in Asset Management, International Commercial Lending, Corporate Strategic Planning, and Forensic Finance. I hold M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from NYU and am a Certified Financial PlannerTM registrant. I taught Finance at NYU from 1989-1998 and since 2000 have been teaching Finance with pleasure at the Lander College for Men, Touro University. I have published two e-books in a series which will eventually number five OER volumes. Over the years, I have found that my students ask questions from perspectives that I had not considered. I have endeavored to inculcate these questions into my books. These texts were written for them and the students have taught me so much. Thus, the texts are written in a most friendly manner and are replete with examples and exercises so that the learner can proceed smoothly through the material.
Welcome to our series recognizing champions of free and affordable course materials at Touro! These “Textbook Heroes” have made a difference in the lives of our students by lowering the cost of their degrees. Do you know someone who fits the bill? Nominate them (or yourself) by contacting the Libraries.
Welcome to our series recognizing champions of free and affordable course materials at Touro! These “Textbook Heroes” have made a difference in the lives of our students by lowering the cost of their degrees. Do you know someone who fits the bill? Nominate them (or yourself) by contacting the Libraries.
Who are you? Tell us more about you and the course you teach.
I’m David Nussbaum, an assistant professor at Touro in the Speech and Communications department.
Fall Semester is here and, after all the holidays of September had us mostly away from our work and studies, things are starting to get into full swing at Touro. So, now is the perfect time to announce that we have a fantastic new resource to help introduce faculty to, or remind them of, all the services our Libraries offer.
Do you have readings you’d like to make available to your students online?
Sharing in Canvas: If you are sharing a journal article or book chapter from outside of the Touro College Libraries databases with your class this semester, you may need to get copyright clearance to include the material in your Canvas course. This applies to electronic and scanned materials. The Libraries are available to assist you with determining whether you need to secure copyright clearance, and, if you do, with requesting permission to share. Please contact Marina Zilberman for more information.
Welcome to our series recognizing champions of free and affordable course materials at Touro! These “Textbook Heroes” have made a difference in the lives of our students by lowering the cost of their degrees. Do you know someone who fits the bill? Nominate them (or yourself) by contacting the Libraries.
[refresher: Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to all users. They reside in the public domain, or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.]
The Touro College OER Faculty Fellowship, sponsored by Touro College Libraries and funded by a grant from the Network of the National Library of Medicine Middle Atlantic Region, supports faculty in the health sciences and allied health fields in developing Open Educational Resources for their undergraduate and graduate students. The fellowship was awarded to five Touro Faculty members to support adopting, or creating OER for use in their courses.
Neil’s fellowship project, the Lander College for Women Microbiome Project, takes the form of a collection of OER modules (textbook chapters, articles, videos, etc.), adopted from several sources, and hosted in Canvas. It was created for his Principles of Biology I course and lab. With this course taken by roughly 600 students a year, Neil’s fellowship project has the potential to save Touro students around $70,000 a year in textbook costs!
Here, Neil answers a few questions about his OER fellowship project:
Why were you interested in OER in the first place?
There is a wealth of helpful information in the form of Open Educational Resources. In the recent shift to remote-based learning, I feel that is important to take advantage of the online resources that are available.
How was your experience finding tools and resources for OER?
It was pleasantly surprising finding many online resources with OER. Through TouroOne, the online Library resources were very helpful. Several different OER Biology textbooks were available as well as OER course material. The OER library staff was extremely helpful in helping myself and the other fellows. We met regularly and we were made aware of different resources.
What were your goals? Did you achieve the goals you had set out for your project?
My goal was to create an online resource for students to access information on the Human Microbiome project. Thanks in large part to the Touro Libraries OER resources I was able to achieve that.
Can you give us a description of your OER fellowship project?
My project was to develop an online resource to learn about the Microbiome, loosely defined as microorganisms, such as bacteria, that are found throughout the human body. It plays an important role in our understanding of our interactions with microorganisms and can help better understand which microorganisms are associated with clinical conditions and can help to improve the overall state of human health. I have used OER to first provide some background information on microorganisms in general. Also, the term Biome is an Ecology term that describes the interactions with organisms on a particular habitat, so I have provided some background information on that as well.
The idea of the microbiome is the microorganisms that inhabit our bodies, which is the habitat so to speak, in an ecological sense. There is a lot of Microbiome information provided. Some in the form of informative video content, some in the form of an open online course at MIT and links to papers and online books and other important websites that inform a lot about the microbiome. Finally, since this is intended to be a resource for Lander College for Women, a Womens Jewish College, there is also information about the impact of the human microbiome on women’s health, as well as information regarding a parallel concept in Jewish Philosophy, that a human being is a microcosm of a world.
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