Meet our 2023 OER Faculty Fellows!

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:

Party Planning: Event Management Student Presentations

GCA 306 Event Management students take questions after their presentations. From L-R: Avi Manoucheri, Dane Medlock, Jayan Shrestha, Eugene Dorfman, Teresa Cadiz, Kimberly Fernandez, Sara Amador, Irina Dovbnya

On Tuesday May 19th, the students from Professor Gena Bardwell’s GCA 306 “Event Management” course gave their final presentations at a meeting of the Speech & Communication Department’s Communications Club. All semester, students have worked on developing and planning a large fundraising event, including everything from donors and guest speakers to the venue and menus. They were also responsible for the less glamorous details, like budgeting, to-the-minute scheduling, floor plans, and evacuation procedures.

Touro students show off their oratorical skills in the Annual Speech Competition

The winners of the contest – first place went to Tsipporah Youseflaleh (second from left)

On Thursday, May 7^th, 2015, I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the 19^th annual Speech and Communications Department Speech Contest, held at the Midtown campus, and organized by professors George Backinoff, Gena Bardwell, and Deputy Chair Hal Wicke.  Ten students from different speech and communications classes prepared speeches, both informational and persuasive, on a variety of topics.  Sitting with me as judges were Dean Timothy Taylor and Professor Mike Walters.  We scored the speeches using a number of criteria, including organization, delivery, and content, and entries were also timed.