Welcome to Sociology101: Open Educational Resources (OER)

This is a place for OER materials for Sociology 101 ("Introduction to Sociology") course for the college classroom.  Jessie Daniels (Professor, Sociology, Hunter College) created the site for anyone teaching a beginning sociology course. This short video (4:40) explains some of the research that supports "open" (and low-cost) materials for students: 

Open education resources (OERs) are freely available and distributable course materials. While people usually emphasize open access textbooks when talking about OER, it can actually encompass all kinds of materials, from syllabi to presentations to exercises. There are many definitions and interpretations of OER, but for the purposes of this site, the focus will be on OER materials that are:

• available at no cost to faculty and to students
• can be modified by faculty and/or students
• can be redistributed by faculty who have made changes to the original OER work

If you want to learn more about OER, check out this course developed by CUNY librarian Steve Ovadia. 

At Hunter College, we are part of program called "Hunter Zero Cost," in which the main focus is providing courses to students at zero cost for materials.

How to Use this Site

You can download, reuse, remix any of the materials here for teaching your own SOC101 class. In the short term, our goal is for ALL Sociology 101 courses taught at Hunter College in the spring 2018 will be 'zero cost' to students for books or other materials. You should make use of these materials toward that end.

Over the longer term, if you have your own OER (or zero cost) materials you would like to share with other sociology instructors at Hunter College and beyond, please add them to this site! This site is a wiki, which simply means that anyone can edit it, but you will need to create a login for the site. 

Notifications: You may want to adjust the settings to your liking. The default is that users get notifications every time the wiki is updated, but you can turn those off. Go to Settings > Notifications, and unclick "enable notifications." 

• Syllabus
• Textbooks 
• Additional Readings 
• Lectures & Presentation Slides
• Documentaries & Short Videos
• Video Worksheets 
• Discussion Questions 
• Tests, Quizzes & Rubrics  
• Using a Learning Management System (LMS) 

Additional Pedagogy Resources:

• Class Discussion - Nathan Palmer's Sociology Source
• The Sociological Cinema - Collection of short videos for use in teaching sociology 
• Teaching with a Sociological Lens - A (closed) Facebook group; if you're on Fb, simply ask to join) 
• PopSoc - An open Facebook page, created by sociologist Deborah Lupton. 
• Teaching & Learning Resources - from the ASA (some free, most require membership to access)
• Ways of Thinking: Teacher Resources - from Chris Sal 
• ACERT: Faculty Development - Hunter College's Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching. Weekly events, and ample online resources.