Open Educational Resources - OER
The Future of Collaboration in Education
@joe_edtech
At both of our high schools in District 113, teachers are considering the possibilities that may arise for both them and their students as they plan to teach in fully integrated, 1:1 classroom. I constantly get questions about how we can best leverage the tools available to us and our students. To answer that question, and to introduce today's free tech tools, I want to tell a brief story about a conference I attended last year hosted by the Association for Educational Communication and Technology (AECT).
After attending several other state and national technology conferences, my expectations for the AECT were low, and I imagined I was going to see a lot of research on miniscule topics that had little to do with the teaching and learning that actually goes on in my high school. I was, frankly, blown away by what I learned at the conference, and I have been excitedly telling everyone I can about the possibilities since I returned. At the end of the first day, I attended a presentation by Dr. David Wiley, Co-Founder of Lumen Learning, an organization that supports the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) both at the University and at the K-12 level. (This isn't the presentation I saw, but you can click here to get the idea.)
My excitement in OER cannot be contained to one blog post. Today I just want to tell you what OER are and how much quality free stuff is available to you and your students.
First off, what exactly are Open Educational Resources? OER are any kind of classroom teaching materials, including:
- textbooks
- syllabi
- lesson plans
- videos
- articles
- exams
They are "Open" Educational Resources because they are in the public domain or hold Creative Commons Licensing. That means that any OER can be reused, revised, remixed, and/or redistributed (Lumen Learning - the 4 Rs). Ultimately OER don't carry the heavy price of commercial textbooks and ancillaries. However, nor do they include the slick finishing of commercial textbooks. The power and the weakness of OER is that they are never "finished" (foreshadowing to my next post).
In the not too distant past, schools and teachers shied away from using OER because the materials just weren't that robust. However, with the advent of the Creative Commons Project and organizations like Lumen Learning, there are tons of resources available.
Perhaps the most important collection of Open Educational Resource materials and tools for high school moving towards a 1:1 learning environment is called CK-12. CK-12 is a tool and a colloection of materials that allows teachers to build digital textbooks, called "Flexbooks," that are interactive and easily accessible on any device. And, while you can start building your textbook from scratch, you certainly don't have to do so. There are lots of books that have already been shared with Creative Commons Licensing, so you can feel free to take any book that already exists on CK-12, edit it, and make it your own.
Why would you want to build your own textbook? I can only speak from my experience. I taught European History, and used the textbook to provide my students with a more or less chronological narrative overview of the time line we covered in class. However, I struggled finding great textbooks. Invariably I would have to choose one textbook, that would be the official textbook adopted for the class for a minimum of 6 years, and it would either lack depth or clarity with regards to a number of topics. Then I would spend a great deal of my time supplementing that textbook with materials from other texts and resources to fill in the incredibly wide gaps left in the narrative. With CK-12, I wouldn't need to rely on a commercially created (and perhaps politically charged) textbook. I would be able to use all of the resources available to me to build my own narrative.
In order to get started, all you need to do is go to http://www.ck12.org/teacher/ and create a free account.
Perhaps the most important collection of Open Educational Resource materials and tools for high school moving towards a 1:1 learning environment is called CK-12. CK-12 is a tool and a colloection of materials that allows teachers to build digital textbooks, called "Flexbooks," that are interactive and easily accessible on any device. And, while you can start building your textbook from scratch, you certainly don't have to do so. There are lots of books that have already been shared with Creative Commons Licensing, so you can feel free to take any book that already exists on CK-12, edit it, and make it your own.
Why would you want to build your own textbook? I can only speak from my experience. I taught European History, and used the textbook to provide my students with a more or less chronological narrative overview of the time line we covered in class. However, I struggled finding great textbooks. Invariably I would have to choose one textbook, that would be the official textbook adopted for the class for a minimum of 6 years, and it would either lack depth or clarity with regards to a number of topics. Then I would spend a great deal of my time supplementing that textbook with materials from other texts and resources to fill in the incredibly wide gaps left in the narrative. With CK-12, I wouldn't need to rely on a commercially created (and perhaps politically charged) textbook. I would be able to use all of the resources available to me to build my own narrative.
In order to get started, all you need to do is go to http://www.ck12.org/teacher/ and create a free account.
CK-12 is probably the most relevant and powerful tool for schools looking to make the conversion to a digital curriculum, but it certainly isn't the only good resource out there. Take a look through some of the great OER available to anyone willing to invest their very precious time to investigate them:
OPEN - Open Professionals Education Network:
Lumen Learning Open Courses:
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