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How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom | MindShift | KQED News

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How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom | MindShift | KQED News

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Keeping information fresh and up to date in a quickly moving world is one of the biggest reasons districts are starting to get more serious about the power of teacher-created open resources. Districts typically adopt new textbooks on a five-year cycle. At that point, some of the information is outdated.

Another reason teachers like Langhorst are excited about this movement is the ability to adapt resources for their own use. If a teacher believes a lesson plan found online isn't completely aligned with the standards taught in his state, he can modify it until he's comfortable with it. And, textbook companies often tailor their content to the legislative priorities of big states like Texas and California -- where there are lots of schools -- essentially forcing teachers in other states to accept language around some ideas, like climate change and the characterization of different ethnic groups, that were approved by those state legislatures.

But many teachers still have big questions about OER that will determine how many of them choose to adopt this approach to teaching and curriculum. Teachers are familiar with the amount of time and energy it takes to create good learning materials because many already curate and remix lessons. As the infrastructure to search and share those lesson plans becomes more robust, some teachers wonder whether they should share lessons they created with the world when they were never compensated for the time they put into making them. Others worry about issues of intellectual copyright.

"You've got this potentially great lesson that you've created and you want to share it, but it's not a book or a song, something that traditionally has an author," Langhorst said. Instead, lesson plans are often mashups of articles, videos, photos and other media. Teachers are hesitant to share those lessons with their names attached because they know they don't actually own all the elements within it.

"I can't think of many things I do in the classroom that I can solely say I created or that I thought of," Langhorst said. He's also worried that some districts will pull back from textbooks as a way to save money (a lot of money), but won't reinvest those savings into the teachers creating curriculum or into professional development to help them use the new resources well.
GOING OPEN BY FOCUSING ON PROJECTS
Vista Unified School District, just north of San Diego, has been quietly transitioning to open educational resources through its focus on providing alternative paths to learning for students. For example, Vista Visions Academy allows K-12 students to attend school only half the time, while pursuing independent study at home through online programs.

In middle school, students come to a school building only three days a week. They get help from their teacher or peers, have advisory and complete lab classes. The other two days a week are done online. High school students take 90 percent of their classes online. Because of the unique structure at Vista Visions, teachers there have been using digital resources they curated for several years.

District leaders are also trying to support teachers to move more toward a project-based learning approach to teaching and away from traditional, textbook-bound instruction. As part of the process they are training teachers to curate and remix engaging lessons, paying them for their time while they're doing it. "We're trying to teach teachers to be discerning about what they're bringing to kids," said Erin English, Vista's director of blended and online learning.

She says this shift in professional development has translated to a change of instruction. A few years ago most teachers in a typical Vista Unified classroom were following a textbook, assigning a worksheet to practice a skill, and then doing an activity or writing assignment based on that lesson. Now, teachers who have had extra training are asking students to find their own information and use it to display their knowledge of the subject. Sometimes teachers will tell students where to find that information, but they are also trying to help students analyze their sources.

"It's getting teachers to understand that all students learn differently," English said. "We've been standardizing our instruction for years, but we haven't been very successful."

English said one big point of pushback from her teachers revolves around the time it takes to create materials this way. She understands it's a huge workload, which is why she's committed to paying teachers in her district who are working to create open educational resources.

"It's about giving kids current, relevant and timely material," English said. She contends that teachers can't teach their students to think critically about the world and the information presented to them if they learn from only one source while in school. Open educational resources can help drive home the point that there's always another opinion or a different perspective.

"We need to give [students] problems for them to solve themselves," English said. That's why she's so excited about a collaborative project Vista teachers created with teachers in Ohio and Wisconsin about how the earth affects people and how people affect the earth. The seventh-grade teachers at middle schools in all three states collaborated to build a unit of study that students in each class would do over three months. Students also collaborated with one another across state lines to give feedback, eventually presenting their final projects to one another through Google Hangouts.

"Students chose how they were going to display how they were going to master those standards through projects," English said. In the final products, students demonstrated their learning with everything from coding to making videos. One girl built her own smoke machine to simulate smog. English said the cross-state collaboration was particularly fun because students in different parts of the country had a lot of misconceptions about one another. Connecting over their projects helped them learn about different regions of the country.

"We have not done competency-based education, nor have we done a lot of open materials in our classrooms in a typical school," English said. Teachers involved in the collaboration were dipping their toes into a lot of new areas, but they felt safe doing so because the teachers in Ohio had much more experience with both project-based learning and competency-based education.

"For our teachers it was enlightening," English said. While the collaboration impacted relatively few teachers and students, the exhibition of the projects sparked excitement in other teachers to try something similar. The use of open resources trickled down into other classes that are now trying to use digital content they've curated as supplements to textbooks.

"Most teachers have been doing this for a really long time without publicizing it," English said. California teachers often feel particularly hamstrung by textbooks because of a court ruling in the Williams case that every child must have access to a textbook. The law came out of a class-action lawsuit meant to ensure equal access to clean and safe facilities and up-to-date learning materials for all California students. Practically, that means many district leaders feel they must spend huge portions of slim budgets on textbooks.

"Very few people haven't realized the gold mine of the internet," English said. That's why she's grateful the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education has been supportive of open educational resources through its #GoOpen push.

The Office of Ed Tech is supporting districts to #GoOpen in a few ways. First, staff members are trying to ensure that there is infrastructure in place to make teacher-created materials more discoverable. Amazon has brought its recommending and search prowess to the project with Inspire, a platform where teachers can upload their lessons, tag them and make them freely available to other teachers around the country. Inspire is still in beta, with several district around the country testing its functionality. The plan is for the Inspire platform to be compatible with third-party learning management systems that many schools already use, so teachers can search the learning registry from within their school's platform.

Another part of the #GoOpen initiative is to connect districts doing this work and encourage more to join. DOE staff have paired "Ambassador" districts with "launch" districts, like Liberty and Vista, so educators involved in this work can share information, best practices and learnings.

Lastly, the DOE recognizes that for many K-12 educators the OER space is new and a little daunting. Staff members are working to offer districts some guidance as they think about beginning to work more teacher-created and curated resources into their curricula.

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How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom

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Keeping information fresh and up to date in a quickly moving world is one of the biggest reasons districts are starting to get more serious about the power of teacher-created open resources. Districts typically adopt new textbooks on a five-year cycle. At that point, some of the information is outdated.

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Learning Registry | sharing what we know

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Learning Registry | sharing what we know

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Rating thousands of products and services annually: Learning Registry tests, rates, and reviews thousands of consumer products and services.

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Open Education - Office of Educational Technology

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Open Education - Office of Educational Technology

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Open Education

We believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.

Openly Licensed Educational Resources

In the 2017 National Education Technology Plan, the Department defines openly licensed educational resources as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. Digital openly licensed resources can include complete online courses, modular digital textbooks as well as more granular resources such as images, videos, and assessment items.

#GoOpen Initiative

The U.S. Department of Education's #GoOpen initiative supports States and districts choosing to transition to the use of openly licensed educational resources to transform teaching and learning. Learn what it takes to be a #GoOpen District or State:

Implementing an Open Approach
#GoOpen District Launch Packet
Across the country, districts are choosing to #GoOpen and transitioning to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. This resource is designed for districts that have decided to implement a systematic approach to incorporating openly licensed educational resources into their curriculum by becoming a #GoOpen District.

Department of Education Final Regulation on Open Licensing Requirement for Competitive Grant Programs

On October 29, 2015 the Department announced proposed regulations that would require copyrightable intellectual property created with Department competitive grant funds to have an open license.

The Department has announced final regulations that require, with certain exceptions, that grantees receiving Department funds under a competitive grant program openly license copyrightable grant deliverables created with those funds. We believe that the rule will significantly enhance dissemination of valuable educational resources and provide stakeholders with greater access to use, reuse, and modify these deliverables. This will make it easier for education stakeholders, such as LEAs, SEAs, IHEs, teachers, students, and others to benefit from Department funded learning materials, even if they are not themselves recipients of Department funds. The final regulations became effective on May 22, 2017 and the Department will fully implement this rule for all applicable competitive grant programs beginning in FY 2018.

Read the Final Regulation and our blog announcing its release.

Read the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and public comments.

NPRM Frequently Asked Questions: Open License NPRM FAQs, Updated November 18, 2015.

How Williamsfield Schools Decided to #GoOpen

Building on openly licensed resources, the Williamsfield School District leveraged education technology to save families and taxpayers money while providing unique, targeted learning opportunities for each student.

Why use Openly Licensed Educational Resources?

Resources that are openly licensed benefit schools in a number of ways, but most notably they help to:

Increase Equity - All students have access to high quality learning materials that have the most up-to-date and relevant content because openly licensed educational resources can be freely distributed to anyone.

Keep Content Relevant and High Quality - Traditional textbooks are perpetually outdated, forcing districts to re-invest significant portions of their budgets on replacing them. The terms of use of openly licensed educational resources allows educators to maintain the quality and relevance of their materials through continuous updates.

Empower Teachers - Openly licensed educational resources empower teachers as creative professionals by giving them the ability to adapt and customize learning materials to meet the needs of their students without breaking copyright laws.

Save Money - Switching to educational materials that are openly licensed enables schools to repurpose funding spent on textbooks for other pressing needs, such as investing in the transition to digital learning. In some districts, replacing just one textbook has made tens of thousands of dollars available for other purposes.

U.S. Department of Education Announces Final Regulation on Open Licensing Requirement for Competitive Grant Programs

Open Data

Open data is the idea that data should be freely available to the public-both technically and legally-to use and redistribute without limitation. When high-value data sets are publicly available practitioners, researchers, and the public can use the data to inform their work in classroom and communities across America.

Open data follows the following principles:

Public - available to all in accordance with the law and the Office of Management and Budget's Open Government Directive.

Accessible - available to the widest range of users in a machine-readable format that is non-exclusive and usable without restriction.

Remixable - available under an open license that allows others to use, share, and add to data without restriction.

Open Data Sets & Resources

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Open Education - Office of Educational Technology

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We believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.