He is one of a small but growing number of educational leaders pushing their states to use free content available online, known
as open educational resources, or develop their own.
I've written widely
about open educational resources elsewhere in this blog and think that openly licensed materials hold great potential as a significant alternative.
I believe commercial services will still be needed for complicated or customized situations, but
open educational resources offer low - cost (though higher - maintenance) alternatives for teachers.
Open educational resource examples from within BC and from around the world will be used to illustrate the rich and diverse range of resources already available for free and immediate use.
It stresses that increasing efforts have to be made to promote the culture
of open educational resources and the need to ensure quality assurance and recognition of online learning.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (n.d.), which has been working to spread the creation and use of
open educational resources for more than 10 years, defines OER as
States are creating their own OER hubs to curate and
create open educational resources to share with educators across their state and in other states in a broad range of fields, including English Language Arts, STEM, and ELL.
But the growing reliance
on open educational resources raises questions — who will produce them, how will they be compensated, how will educators be able to find the best ones, and how will all this affect the market for textbooks?
Many teachers have reportedly begun using
more open educational resources — freely accessible, openly - licensed documents and programs — in recent years to improve day - to - day teaching, learning and assessment of student progress in real - time.
This isn't Core Knowledge's first toe in the pond of OER
[open educational resources], which generally means that materials can be downloaded for free, modified, and shared, though sometimes not for commercial gain.
Curriculum Crafter offers K - 12 curricular resources aligned to the Common Core,
curated open educational resources (OER) and more than 1,000 sample lesson plans, as well as assignment of standards, standards tracking and full mapping capabilities.
Major division initiatives being implemented include online testing, adult literacy programming,
open educational resources development, technology best practices, longitudinal data system implementation, career training and industry certifications and virtual school programming.
Marcinek presents his six
favorite open educational resources, introducing a wide world of curriculum materials as alternatives to textbooks, resources for inspiring your students toward creative exploration and inquiry.
The district also has embarked on an ambitious project to build a
robust open educational resources (OER) curriculum with learning pathways that meet the needs of different students.
If open educational resources rely on teachers to spend lots of time sifting through materials or creating it themselves, that could send teachers back to textbooks posthaste.
(3) Learning List's Fill - in — the - Gap (TM) tool and search - by - standard search filter make it easy to identify new materials, including
free open educational resources that are aligned to the standards students are struggling with.
Happily, our teachers, librarians, and teaching and learning specialists have found a wealth of excellent materials
through open educational resources, also known as OER (Marcinek, 2013).
In K - 12 schools, however,
where open educational resources have been hailed as an opportunity to democratize high - quality curriculum and break the publishing oligopoly, OER has had a slower uptake.
Leading provider of
open educational resources Open Up Resources has secured a potentially huge platform for reaching K - 12 schools by striking a partnership with Microsoft to deliver its curriculum through the tech giant's classroom products.
Simultaneously, Achieve also publicized a «call to action,» seeking educators to submit high -
quality open educational resources (OER) that address the problem areas identified by the panel.
Technology facilitates meaningful communication between schools and families, equips students, teachers and school leaders with useful data, and creates exciting and engaging instructional opportunities by connecting learners with a wide array of resources, including
rich open educational resources.
«The Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the university system, approved a 2018 - 19 budget request last week that includes a $ 656,000 program to encourage the greater use of so - called «eTexts» and
other open educational resources instead of standard textbooks.»
Using web -
based open educational resource aggregators and repositories participants will be invited to find and select resources pertinent to their academic field of study and instruction.
An applied / hands on session will follow providing more in depth opportunities for participants to explore, discover, and
dissect open educational resources pertinent to their academic domain of interest.
From open educational resources to common - core standards, this special report guides educators through the bewildering array of K - 12 curricular options available to classrooms today.