Who we are
Hi! We are staff members at the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and work together to support faculty at Baruch and, with programming like this, CUNY at-large. We are all also teaching faculty with decades of combined years of experience across disciplines. We run workshops and structured seminars to address various teaching strategies and topics such as course design, syllabus construction, integrating technology into the classroom, grant applications, and matters pertaining to academic integrity. For more information about the Baruch CTL, visit our website.
Why use open-source?
Open-source tools are
- free to use, study, change, and distribute without limits;
- available to anyone and for any purpose—the software and its source code; and
- meant to create shareable cultural goods and encourage public scholarship—including open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy.
Our team of facilitators for this seminar
Shiraz Biggie, Seth Graves, Amanda Matles, Pamela Thielman, Katherine Tsan
Our philosophy
In this seminar, we ask you to ….
Experience being a student.
Since this is an online seminar, you will be expected to complete assignments, attend supplementary synchronous workshops and/or asynchronous activities, interact with participants online, and come to each synchronous Core Session fully prepared. This prep work should generally not take you longer than 1-2 hours per week outside of the synchronous time.
We introduce a number of new technologies in the seminar and provide tutorials to guide you through figuring out issues on your own, but also feel free to reach out to us for help. If you get frustrated with the tech at times, that’s normal; it’s part of the learning experience.
Actively participate.
We design activities to facilitate extensive participant interaction, reflection, and collaboration. We may ask you to join in on discussions, do reflective writing and thinking, annotate texts and videos digitally, and other active learning activities that rely on participants having done their homework.
A key success factor is everyone’s engagement. Therefore, we expect participants to attend each Core Session in its entirety and participate as fully as possible. That said, what we mean by “participation” is not always the same thing as “talking a lot.”
Interact across disciplines.
The seminar is designed to bring together instructors from across CUNY colleges and departments, so you can learn about approaches to teaching and learning that may be unfamiliar to you from peers outside of your own academic contexts.
Challenge your assumptions.
We ask you to articulate — and sometimes to challenge — your values and assumptions as a teacher. We may ask participants to read challenging or controversial material. Our hope is that you can take this as an opportunity to reflect on why you do what you do (a process that we also undergo very frequently at the CTL!).
Try out new things.
You will be introduced to a lot of new technologies and pedagogical practices throughout the seminar. No one expects you to use all of them in your class, and in fact, an effective course (whether fully online, hybrid, or in-person) can be a course that uses very little technology. We just want you to know your options.
One last thing. . . please take our stuff!
We set up the format for this seminar as a way to model what we are asking you to do in your own classrooms. Please feel free to take and build on anything you like about the seminar and use it in your own classes (this includes session and workshop activities, instructions or documentation that we use, readings we assign, or any resources that we provide during the course of the seminar). All of our materials carry open Creative Commons licenses.
Or improve the things you don’t like about the seminar. And tell us how it goes! We’re also always trying to improve what we do.
Please note: If we ever use your work, we will ask for your permission first. We are teachers, too, and we feel strongly about asking (and compensating) faculty for their labor.
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