Episode 57 Sarah Kresh
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Sarah Kresh: 

What I'm excited about and many people at my school are excited about is how OER and Zero Textbook Cost are concepts that are much more accepted and part of the culture at our school. And so this gives us the opportunity to start thinking about Open Pedagogy and also how OER and Open Pedagogy fit with different kinds of initiatives that are really of interest.

Alan Levine: All right , hello everyone. It's time for another episode of OEG Voices. This is the podcast that we produce here at Open Education Global. What we try to do on these shows is to bring you people, personalities, and ideas of open educators from around the world.

I get the fun job of doing this. I'm Alan Levine from OE Global, looking really forward to my conversation today. We have here all the way from New York City, Sarah Kresh, who was recognized in 2022 with an Open Award for Excellence, in the Emerging Leader category. This is really timely because by the time this is published, the nominations will be open for this year's awards.

I'm very confident that hearing about Sarah's work and her award at the City University of New York is gonna inspire you to think about who might be a candidate to nominate for an award. 

First of all, welcome Sarah, and thank you for making time to have this conversation with us, especially now, I would gather you're busy all the time. So, just tell us where you're sitting right now and maybe tell us about the work that you do there at the University.

Sarah Kresh: Sure. Well, thank you first of all for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be talking with you this afternoon, and I am in my home office across the river from New York City in New Jersey. And yes, as you said, I work at CUNY the City University of New York. Specifically, I work at the School of Professional Studies.

The City University of New York is 25 different colleges and schools and the School of Professional Studies is one of those, 25. We're a relatively small school for within CUNY . We have about 4,000 students. The School of Professional Studies is an almost entirely online school.

We have a very specific mission and function within the CUNY system. So I work at the School of Professional Studies, SPS for short, and I'm in the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology. The office as a whole supports all of the course development for online teaching, we support online teaching and learning.

We do technical troubleshooting, but also a lot of instructional design and faculty development, some of the functions that a teaching and learning center might offer, but it's a slightly different organizational unit, so that's where I work. I'm a faculty development and instructional design manager there.

Alan Levine: I definitely want to dive deeper into this, because I know it's huge system, a fascinating system and I think maybe a lot of people don't really know about all the different working parts there. And of course lots of great examples of projects in open education.

If you don't mind, I always like to ask where did you grow up? And, what kind of student were you as a kid?

Sarah Kresh: So I have a different kind of story in the sense that I, I was born in the States. Both my parents were from New York City, but I actually wound up growing up in Quebec, in rural Quebec, north of Montreal. As such in Quebec, growing up in Canada, I had a completely public education from K through my undergraduate and first graduate degree. 

I went to a fully French elementary school and switched to English language education. I loved school and I went to a system where there was a real balance between academics and other kinds of activities. 

And, it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of emphasis on physical activities, especially winter sports and winter games when I was in elementary school. I think it's still the case =, in Quebec elementary schools through the winter season, have a day of the week where the whole school goes on outdoor adventures.

So it was a lot of fun.

Alan Levine: Was it a bilingual school? Are you fluent in French?

Sarah Kresh: Yes. I'm fluent as a consequence of growing up in Quebec where French is the majority language. Yeah. And I went to French schools for the first bit and then English schools, and then I did college in English. Then I did some graduate work in French. So it's a really interesting experience growing up in Quebec in that way.

Alan Levine: What led you to , circle back to New York City and how did you end up at CUNY?

Sarah Kresh: As consequences of this linguistic experience growing up that I described to you, I became very interested in linguistics and eventually did graduate work in linguistics and came to the City University of New York's graduate center to do an advanced degree in linguistics.

And that's sort of the start of the tie-in to my exposure to open culture. . 

Alan Levine: And that of course leads to the question I wanted to ask, what was your entree into Open Education or Openness and what funneled you into this current work that you're doing?

Sarah Kresh: My first exposure to open culture was really through my graduate studies in linguistics. For one thing linguistics as a field has a very open culture. So for example, in Corpus Linguistics, there are lots of open databases and database analysis tools. In Experimental Linguistics, we use a lot of open source tools, like R, and one database of linguistics I've worked with a lot and is exemplary of this openness is the Child Language Data Exchange system created by Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie Mellon University, which is a huge corpus of child language along with an analysis tool to do all sorts of analysis on those data sets.

That's where my head was at and while I was studying linguistics, I, I wound up having a job at the CUNY School of Professional Studies initially as an instructional technology assistant. That was in 2015 and I continued doing that kind of work. So that was my first exposure to online education, really fully online asynchronous courses and supporting faculty who are developing those kinds of courses and teaching them.

And then in 2017 the New York State government launched the New York State OER Initiative. That initiative, for your listeners, is an investment by the state of New York of eight million dollars in Open Educational Resources and Open Education. It was distributed to the two public systems within New York State, the State University of New York, and the City University of New York, where I am.

When that initiative was launched, in my capacity as an instructional tech assistant, I started working on that and I started learning about OER. It was the first time I'd really learned about OER in a sort of more formal way. And, it was just great, in the sense that in our work at SPS, savings students textbook costs is really impactful.

Just from that initial cost savings motivation, it was really exciting. And then it opened up all these questions like, in those early days, some faculty were a little reluctant to think about using Open Educational Resources. There were some concerns about the quality of the resources and the impact of substituting OER or Zero Textbook Cost resources for traditional textbook materials that they were familiar with. The impact of that on teaching and learning was really interesting. 

The next thing that happened that was really exciting was coming with my social science background from linguistics and , these questions coming up that I just mentioned to you.

I thought, well, I have some quantitative analysis skills. So I applied for and received an Open Ed Research fellowship to look at the impact of changing out the materials in a course from traditional textbooks to zero textbook costs, and looking at that impact. What I was looking at was the impact on the student evaluation surveys and looking at whether we could see any sort of difference , from a quantitative perspective.

It was a really exciting project and it was really exciting to meet all of the people in that fellowship. And I'll just mention that I believe the applications for that fellowship are also open right now. That's definitely something for listeners to check out. 

That led me to getting to go to Open Ed, the big conference for the first time here. And that was another eye-opening moment because there was just so much exciting work going and getting to meet all these people from all over, well, in that case, mostly the United States and Canada, was really exciting.

Alan Levine: I'm really intrigued because I think about your background and experience in, in linguistics, which is so many things. I'm thinking , my favorite expert on everything with artificial intelligence now is Emily Bender. And what she describes as what it means to understand, what is language and thought and creativity. It's so profound and I can see that directly influencing the work that you're doing here thinking about these open textbooks and open resources, I. 

When you go to the main CUNY website it says, Degrees Without Debt, and there's so much emphasis on the student experience. You told us a little bit about the system, , does your work in SPS reach out across the system in terms of leading and developing these approaches to open education?

Sarah Kresh: In some senses it does. To contextualize it a bit , I mentioned that CUNY is a system that has 25 schools and colleges. Those schools, they're relatively independent. So every school and college is doing its own OER work. Lots of exciting projects , I can direct you to some of those , later on, but, just throughout the system, there's a lot of work going on.

One way that the exchange is happening is that the Central Office of Library Services does coordinate all of the OER initiative work within the system. We do get together once a month, at least, I think twice a semester and talk about what everyone is doing.

The other way that SPS has managed to have an impact in the system is that we have been offering a training program in online teaching. We've been offering it for years and years actually, but we have a new version that we came up with and that we offered when the university went completely remote in March of 2020. 

I got to help create that program and one of my priorities was to make sure that OER was a part of that program. And we have also invited experts in OER from other parts of CUNY from other colleges. We've incorporated some asynchronous materials on OER within the workshop itself. But we, in addition, invited OER experts from throughout CUNY to give live synchronous workshops on using OER.

This had a big impact, I think, because it was a moment where New York City was really deeply affected by the Covid Pandemic. And our students, a big proportion of them already struggle financially, but students were losing their jobs.

The whole city shut down. For them to be able to continue their education, saving them textbook money was really critical. It was pretty exciting because CUNY is such a huge system with something like 250,000 or 275,000 students, and I think 20,000 full-time faculty and another 10,000 part-time faculty.

That whole program reached ultimately about 3,500 faculty, so we really were able to make contact with faculty about OER in really large numbers . That's one of the ways that we try to do outreach and bring the OER work that the different colleges are doing to the system as a whole, if we can, you know, when we can.

Alan Levine: There's so much complexity in a large system. You spoke to some of this-- how has this phase been? I'm not gonna say "post pandemic" because it's never really "post", but what do we see going forward that , is changing the way Cooney or SPS is going about thinking and designing their programs to meet what students need now and going forward. What is changing the direction of some of the work that you're doing?

Sarah Kresh: Well, because my school, the School of Professional Studies has been online all along there haven't really been that many changes for us. What I see going on in the CUNY system and at other schools throughout the United States at least is universities are working on how they're gonna offer more flexible modality options to students, right?

So universities are launching different kinds of online programs, and that's true at CUNY as well. And I think that is a real opportunity for people who work in OER, to get involved in that process, because online course development offers the opportunity for more professional input in the course development process.

So you have the opportunity to get the library involved in suggesting materials or locating materials for new courses in a way that is more of an opportunity than when a faculty member is just developing their own face-to-face course by themselves. I mean, they may reach out to the library and they may have that kind of support.

But usually when a course is fully online or hybrid or high flex there's a whole group of professionals, instructional designers who can be more involved earlier on in that process and really help faculty see all the different options there are for them in terms of OER and in terms of Open Pedagogy.

So that's exciting.

Alan Levine: What's a typical day like for you Sarah?

Sarah Kresh: Well,

Alan Levine: I admit that's a terrible question cuz there, is there anything such as a typical day? 

Sarah Kresh: I think there, there is, there's a lot of online communication throughout the typical day. So, you know, our office runs on Slack. There's a lot of Zoom calls, there's a lot of email, so there's a lot of online communication throughout the day. On great days, there are pockets of time to sit and read and write without distraction.

Alan Levine: Yeah. Unless some person bothers you about doing a podcast. What are some things that are currently on your plate that are getting a lot of your attention or something that you're excited about?

Sarah Kresh: What I'm excited about and many people at my school are excited about is how OER and Zero Textbook Cost are concepts that are not taken for granted exactly, but just much more accepted and part of the culture at our school. And so this gives us the opportunity to start thinking about Open Pedagogy and also how OER and Open Pedagogy fit with different kinds of initiatives that are really of interest.

At our school, there's a tremendous interest in diversity inclusion, equity and accessibility throughout the institution. We've been talking about these issues amongst the staff, amongst the faculty, and we have a Faculty Advisory Board to our office, the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology, and the Faculty Advisory Board has expressed a lot of interest in how DEIA fits into the process of online course development and online course review.

We have a course review rubric that's applied to new courses or courses that have been revised significantly. The question that the Faculty Advisory Board had is how can that document that expresses the standards for course design at our school be infused with diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility goals that are also an important part of our school culture and our school mission. 

What's interesting about that is there's sort of a zeitgeist where this is really interesting throughout the United States, at least, like the University of California produced one of these rubrics, there's a collaborative project called the DEI Collaborative through Cal State LA and SUNY to provide annotations to the major online course review rubrics that describe DEIA educational practices and then maps them to the different criteria and standards on the course review rubrics.

A really interesting and progressive OPM. It's a private company, but they're very, very forward thinking, called Ease Learning. And they also have a rubric where they've incorporated these goals into the entire course development process. So this is something that's been going on all over, but it's also something that our faculty have expressed an interest in.

The most exciting project recently that we've worked on, is offering faculty a workshop where we provided them with some of these annotations, modeled after the Cal State- SUNY project that I just mentioned, and asked them to use these annotations along with the course review rubric to look at their course and reevaluate it from that perspective and then propose some sort of revision to activities or to the content or the course design and the online learning management system platform. The proposals that we had emphasized different OER and Open Pedagogy approaches to how you can increase inclusivity in the online classroom.

And that was run through the month of March. It was really stimulating and the faculty responded really enthusiastically to that. Hopefully we can move that work forward and bring that to more and more of the faculty. We're hoping to work with our faculty advisory board just to present the project to the faculty at large and see what feedback they have. That's what I'm excited about right now.

Alan Levine: So they were excited about redesigning their course approach. It's not like, oh, it's another thing that I have to do. 

Sarah Kresh: Right. One of the things that the New York State OER Initiative allows us to do is it actually allows us to compensate faculty for participating in faculty development. I think that's important at a school like ours where a huge majority of our faculty are adjunct, part-time faculty. That's one factor there. But another factor , I think is, and I myself have taught within the CUNY system, so I, I know this feeling. As you teach a course, you know, faculty have the motivation to revise a course every semester, to improve it based on what's worked, what hasn't worked, and our faculty are especially interested in this topic. 

And sometimes , just having a dedicated period of time to be able to reflect on those kinds of revisions and what you wanna get done and having that dedicated period of time is just a huge help, especially for our part-time faculty.

There just isn't a lot of time to really think carefully about how you wanna revise a course. So I think that's a big part of it. We can offer them some compensation for their participation in this process but we also are offering this sort of structure and dedicated time period for them to do it.

And that is helpful too.

Alan Levine: Yeah. And that's so commendable that the system sees the value this. Not many places provide professional development for adjunct faculty. Kudos to CUNY , for that.

Sarah Kresh: I think throughout CUNY faculty development is open to part-time and full-time faculty.

Alan Levine: Are there any new initiatives coming down the line or things that you're now thinking that you would like to take on in the next year or two?

Sarah Kresh: Well our whole school is gonna go through an LMS transition, so that is the really big, big project coming up for our office. But for our OER initiative specifically at SPS, one of the things we're looking forward to is we recently acquired a platform called OpenLab, which is not my area of expertise, so I might get this tech stuff wrong, but it's a WordPress based open platform. Students and faculty can have their own sites on there, I know some of the CUNYs have this platform and I think the people at City Tech actually developed it. At City Tech, for example, some faculty actually run their courses on this platform. 

But in any case, it's an open, WordPress based platform that our whole school will be able to use. One of the things that I'm excited about for our OER initiative group is to try to get more of our materials on this open platform. So one ,challenges that we have at SPS is, because we're fully online, all of our programs are offered through our learning management system, which is a closed space. So we've developed some workshops like the one I was just describing, using the course review annotations. We would love to be able to share those more openly. That's what I'm looking forward to, that now that we have this platform that's gonna be launching, I think over the summer and in the fall, that our OER group will be able to share more of our materials, our faculty development materials specifically.

Another thing that's sort of an in interesting idea is there's some interest in our school in providing Spanish language translations of OER textbooks. We have a pretty large Spanish speaking student body, so that's interesting. And we now have a CUNY Pressbooks network. So we have a platform where we could do that kind of thing. 

In fact we just created a CUNY Pressbooks version of introductory statistics, the textbook that our introductory statistics course uses. So CUNY Pressbooks is interesting. It offers a lot of interactivity. There's H5P integrated into it.

Then the other thing that I'm interested in seeing seeing the development of and assisting with the development of, is how these DEIA course review rubric annotations get used within our school and how the faculty respond to that, seeing how it's gonna be integrated into the regular process by which new courses are designed and then approved to run at our school.

So that's really interesting.

Alan Levine: There is a tradition of innovation there. I know of the CUNY Commons platform that was developed there and, Manifold Scholar, the publishing open source thing. And so here's another one that sounds like it's coming down the pipe. Broadly speaking, when working with faculty, what's the case you make for openness?

Because you talked about, Yeah, there's a lot of " we traditionally do a lot of teaching online" through SPS, but it's generally within closed systems. How do you go about making the sell or the convincing case to faculty to open up these materials as you're looking at some of these new platforms?

Sarah Kresh: Well, it's a very gradual process, I would say. I think that the initial selling point, which is to create a course that is zero textbook costs is a valid one within our school and with our faculty. It really is a critical part of creating access to our degree completion programs at SPS.

So that's the first step really. And then I think, you know, in any group of faculty there are some people who are early adopters and really enthusiastic. I remember when the OER initiative first started, like 2017, 2018 we had a faculty member who taught anatomy and physiology, which is a course that has a very expensive publisher textbook.

They were in the first cohort of people to go with an OER book and found a book that was actually published on a personal website of a professor in Spain. There's that sort of openness and and then there are faculty who are still a little reluctant.

But then, there are also faculty who are interested in open more broadly as a sort of cultural shift, right? We have some faculty who come at it from that perspective and are earlier adopters of open pedagogy projects, like having students produce course materials.

It's a gradual process in terms of presenting to them what the options are. And what the tools are. I'm pretty confident that in the Fall when we have that OpenLab platform that I was describing, a lot of our faculty are gonna be excited about having that platform where they can host their work.

I think right now with everything at our school being within the LMS it's just a little difficult for faculty sometimes to make that leap. Having said all of that, I'm sure there are individual faculty who are doing things that I'm not aware of, you know, that are maybe taking advantage of the Google Suite or doing other kinds of things.

And as soon as faculty get interested in having student work be public facing, they have the option to do that. 

Another thing I'll mention at our school though is that we do have the E-portfolio platform from Digication and many programs make use of that platform. And that's another way of having students an opportunity to make their work public facing.

You know, it's seeking all of these ingredients, presenting these options to faculty and letting them get inspired. If they're inspired and they need some support, that's what our team is here for.

Alan Levine: I like the ingredients metaphor, especially because food in New York is always so good. That works really well. 

I'll toss this in because you're a linguist expert. What are you hearing about or what are you looking at with artificial intelligence and how are people reacting to it? How are you dealing with people reacting to it?

Sarah Kresh: Well, I haven't been too directly involved in these conversations. It's definitely something everyone is talking about. Some people in our office hosted a discussion for our whole school on it a couple weeks ago which unfortunately I couldn't attend. 

I had a look at some of the questions that were generated by faculty, and a lot of them are what are the constructive applications, how can it be used in teaching? There are definitely concerns about how it might be used by students, you know, to get around academic integrity. 

But I think again, it's a situation where our role is to present them with the information that we have, the different kinds of tools, the different kinds of approaches they can use, and support them in whatever direction they wanna go. 

But yes, it's a very, very big question throughout higher ed, I think.

Alan Levine: I know linguists are important in this discussion because they understand what language and machine language can mean. So that, that's really important and then it sounds like it's a positive discussion. It's not just a fear reaction one. 

Sarah Kresh: Among our faculty, it has been a positive one in the sense of wanting to see how it can be used in a constructive way. 

Alan Levine: Well, this has been a great discussion, Sarah. 

I like to ask , obviously you're really busy with work, but what are some of your interests and passions that fill your time or make you find balance outside of work? What do you, what do you like to do? 

Sarah Kresh: Well, it kind of comes back to the first question about, you know, the activities that I loved when I was in school in Quebec. So I really loved just to get outdoors and do outdoor activities like winter sports and when it's not winter or there's not enough snow, just other types of activities in nature. So yeah, kayaking, hiking, that kind of thing.

Alan Levine: That's all good stuff , a way to not be in front of the screen and to really appreciate the world around us.

Sarah Kresh: Yeah.

Alan Levine: I've really enjoyed our conversation and I appreciate your time sharing about what's going on. Of course you can't really characterize a system like CUNY, but you've given us a taste of it.

I hope people are thinking about learning more through some of the issues and they'll follow up with you. 

For folks that'll be listening to this podcast, this is OEG Voices and we produce it here at Open Education Global. For every episode I try to find a music track from the Free Music Archive because it's licensed Creative Commons.

I found a track called "Jonah's Message from New York" by an artist named Dr. Turtle, licensed under a CC-BY license. And Sarah will have to wait until I edit this to get a sense about what kind of music I pick, but I think it's good. You'll find this episode at our site voices dot global dot org.

We'll have our usual follow up conversation with Sarah in our OEG Connect community. We're always looking for other people to bring on the show. It's great to have this time to hear from people like Sarah who are doing this important work.

And again, Sarah, congratulations on getting the leadership award last year. I didn't even ask what happened when you found out? What was the reaction to that?

Sarah Kresh: It was very exciting. My dean who nominated me , everyone was very excited. It was a real honor. I think what's exciting about the the awards is it highlights so much great work all over the world. I love going to look at the website with all the nominations and see what people are doing.

It really helps to put what we're doing in a global context, which is really, really exciting. And edifying. I really appreciate the work that OE Global does in that regard.

Alan Levine: I hope you spread the word through CUNY and think of some projects there or elsewhere that should be nominated this year. It'll be open through the end of June, so there's lots of time to think about it.