OER - Teacher Collaboration

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OER Is More Work - Why on Earth Would I Do That?

@joe_edtech

Tuesday, my blog post was about all of the Open Educational Resources (OER) available to us thanks to projects like Lumen Learning and Creative Commons. Today I want to discuss why we would want to invest our time in searching for, adapting, and using OER. After all, that certainly sounds like a lot of extra work. I'll skip the obvious diatribe about the democratization of information on the grand scale of Gutenberg's printing press revolution and just focus on the products we provide to students, for now.

Anna Yezierska wrote a short story called, "America and I." It is one of my favorite stories ever specifically because of the conclusion that she draws from being a newcomer to the US. She said that while there were a lot of things she could complain about as an immigrant, she loved America because whatever else is true, "America isn't finished yet." It is constantly being recreated and improved.

Think about the text books that we use in class. Despite the exorbitant cost, I have yet to find a slick packaged text book that is what I would call "good." Good means - well written, with a compelling narrative, complete with a deep discussion of multiple perspectives, offering a full breadth of coverage, enhanced by images that create a memorable experience, and allows for easy, appropriate differentiation. BUT, since we spent so much money to get the text book in the first place, we can pretty well guarantee that we, or more accurately our students, will be stuck with that text book for five or six years.

Using Open Educational Resources instead of commercial products would require us to do more work with our PLC members and other educators. There is no "canned" product to use with kids right out of the box. However, what we "create" for our kids is really just text book 1.0. Within PLCs or other collaborative teams, we can engage in an iterative process that can improve our classroom materials not only from year to year, but from day to day! That means we can look at our materials and reflect on the whole experience after every classroom use, Using OER can help us engage in reflective professional conversation with my colleagues, and help all of us produce something even better for the next time. Then the best thing about our adopted classroom materials is that they aren't dependent on a six year purchasing cycle. Instead, they become like Yezierska's America.

So, that's extra work...but it sure seems worth it.

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What do you think, would you adopt OER for your school?

Picture Attribution:

By lumaxart (LuMaxArt Gold Guys With Creative Commons Symbol) [CC BY-SA 2.0 or CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons