Ching-Jung Chen is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the City College of the City University of New York. Leading the Digital Scholarship Services in the Library, she works with faculty and staff to manage and publish digital assets for research, preservation, access, and dissemination. In partnership with several different campus units, the Digital Scholarship Services provide support in the areas of open education, CUNY’s institutional repository, and digital collections management. Ching-Jung received her PhD from Rutgers University, where she wrote her dissertation about the English conversation piece. Her research interests include open access, open educational resources, and digital project management as well as 18th-century British portraits and Atayal textiles.
Ching-Jung’s capstone project focused on developing training materials for faculty who are considering OER courses. The outcome takes the shape of an online asynchronous OER workshop, which welcomed its first group of instructors on May 4th 2020. While designed for City College of New York professors who participate in the CUNY OER Initiative, most of the content can be easily adapted by other institutions. To ensure easy access, Ching-Jung decided against using the college’s LMS, Blackboard. Instead of Blackboard, the workshop is built on an open platform, WordPress, hosted by CUNY Academic Commons. The workshop, which is designed to be completed by the participant in two weeks, consists of eight modules covering topics essential for any faculty planning to develop OER courses. They are: OER basics; copyright and fair use; creative commons license; finding, developing, and delivering OER; backward design; and accessibility.