As SUNY, and all of higher education, moves towards open scholarship, open publication, open education resources, and other data, it is essential that we have a solid understanding of the possibilities, potential, and impactof providing and utilizing high quality open material.
The SUNY Council of Library Directors (SCLD) has recruited a group of talented and engaging speakers to provide perspectives on why Open Access is such a critical issue for higher education and scholarly publishing. Faculty, librarians, staff, and students from all of SUNY are invited to join the conversation, learn about open access, have your questions answered, and share the good work that happens on our campuses.
SUNY Online Teaching is pleased to partner with the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida (UCF) to showcase best practices in online teaching and learning via the award winning international Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) – an open public resource hosted by UCF that reviews, selects, and organizes effective online practices for online faculty, instructional designers and other online teaching and learning practitioners.
TOPR is an open resource for faculty and instructional designers dedicated to enhancing online and blended teaching strategies, serving as a comprehensive repository that showcases a wide range of teaching strategies. Each entry is meticulously drawn from the real-world pedagogical practices of experienced online and blended teaching faculty. These strategies are illustrated with actual course artifacts, providing a concrete understanding of their application. Furthermore, each entry from contributors across the world is thoughtfully aligned with findings from relevant research or professional practice literature, ensuring that the strategies are both practical and evidence-based.
SUNY Online Teaching, in collaboration with the University of Central Florida (UCF), sponsors an initiative to recognize excellence in online teaching practices across SUNY by annually inviting entries from our Effective Online Practices Award Program to be submitted to TOPR for consideration and inclusion.
Additionally, the SUNY Online Course Quality Rubric (OSCQR) standards have been cross-walked with the TOPR repository to include TOPR resources into the OSCQR rubric, where applicable, as examples to help faculty refresh their online courses.
