Course Design Guide

The CityU library offers a variety of collections containing articles, ebooks, videos, cases, reports, and more. Using a variety of materials from the library ensures that students have access to those materials. Using the library also demonstrates the standard that we expect in student assignments. Accessing materials through the library familiarizes the student with our offerings.

Tips

• Add resources to your reading list in Leganto. This ensures consistent access to all resources and the library can monitor resources for reported broken links. Links in Brightspace shells cannot be monitored by the library.
• Incorporate materials into activities and assignments. This ensures that students are using resources at their point of need. It also increases engagement with the materials.
• Use a variety of resources to encourage different learning styles and increase accessibility.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational material freely available for faculty, students, and staff to use, reuse, adapt, and/or share. They can be used as instructional materials in courses and bring many benefits to students and faculty. As a course designer, consider these resources as alternatives or additions to costly materials. Contact a librarian if you need more guidance when using Open Educational Resources. Our complete guide on OER can be found here:

Collaborate with a Librarian

Librarians can help you with all aspects of decision making regarding course resources. Review these initiatives and contact a librarian today!

• Textbook savings program: Librarians can help you manage costs for your students. If you are considering a textbook or resource, we recommend contacting a librarian to see if there are purchasing options for the library. In addition, librarians review all course adoptions that are located on the reading list and that are required for students. All adoptions that are not already sourced through the library undergo a review for purchasing options. Any required resource that is available as an ebook with multiple user licenses, is purchased for the library collections. This ensures accessibility for all students and significantly reduces the cost of attending CityU.
• Selection of Materials Consultations: Librarians can help you research areas, subjects, topics, that you want to cover in your class. We recommend setting a meeting with a librarian to discuss these topics. You can also send us a list of items you would like researched and we will provide recommendations from the library collection as well as online. The final decision is up to you and we can work toward resources that suit your needs. 
• Case Study Creation: Case studies can be hard to source primarily because companies that create case studies expect payment for these documents. The library has a guide to finding case studies but, librarians can also create folders with library materials that can serve as cases. These folders can contain articles, graphs, statistics, and other materials that can be used by students to analyze certain types of situations relevant to the course teachings.
• Incorporating OER: A librarian can help you incorporate OER materials in your class in addition to finding relevant, reputable, and reliable OER materials online.

Selecting materials for a class can bring up a number of copyright questions. When designing a class, the first thing to keep in mind is that you are selecting materials that are embedded in a reading list and a course shell and that will be used quarter after quarter for all sections. In general, this means that fair use is not a defense for these items.

Please review our Copyright page for more information and consult with a librarian if you have any questions.

Copyright for Faculty

Items that are already found within in the library collection do not need to be evaluated and can be freely shared with students via the Reading List (preferred) or an appropriate CityU link.

Information Privilege

In order to challenge information privilege, we must first examine our own privileges within these systems. Privilege is multi-layered and may change over time. For example, the privileges that you experience now as a faculty within an institution with access to scholarly materials, may not apply if you no longer have relationships with academic institutions. As you select resources for your students and courses, try to critically examine your position and identify ways in which you can help make information sharing more equitable.

Questions to Consider

• What barriers exist to accessing information? Some examples include access (or lack thereof) to technology--either personally or through institutional affiliation, as well as barriers due to geographical location or personal socioeconomic status.

  • How might your affiliation with an US- or Canadian-based academic institution allow you to bypass some of these barriers?

  • Have you ever been in a position where you did not have readily available internet or library access?

  • Does where you live impact your ability to access certain content?

• What roles do conventional search methods play in information privilege? Who has access to these processes? Who may be excluded and why? You may, for instance, wish to consider the difference between doing a Google Search vs. an advanced search in a database like Sage Premier or ProQuest.

  • What sorts of information has academia privileged in the past?

  • What types of voices may you be missing by only relying on traditional scholarship? 

• To what extent do the materials in library databases produce dominant research methods and occlude underrepresented, i.e. non-white, knowledge systems? For example, consider the same databases and whether or not they primarily index articles that promote conventional disciplinary methods or whether you can find articles in them that propose methods with a strong diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or antiracist approach.

  • What other types of expertise exist?

  • Where can you find them?

• How might we be complicit in the dissemination and reuse of exclusive information and hegemonic methodologies? How have the resources you selected for a course impacted the scholarly conversation and how does it impact your student's perception of it?

  • What kinds of alternatives to conventional scholarly publishing exist?

  • Are you talking about alternatives to conventional publishing with your students in the context of your subject matter or their assignments?

• Finally, how does information privilege help us better understand other types of privileges as well as the concept of intersectionality? We love this question. It pushes us to think critically about how the scholarly communication process impacts our lives and the lives of others, both within academia and beyond.