Report: Most Educators Aware of OER, Don't Understand OER Licensing. Open Educational Resources.
Inspiring Learning Everywhere. 40 Ways to Learn Almost Anything. Free Is Good. See how a school district will save hundreds of thousands on textbooks. NORTON SHORES, MI -- Mona Shores Public Schools stands to save $80,000-$100,000 every time the district doesn't buy new textbooks because it's using openly licensed resources.
The district is among the first in Michigan, and the first in the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District, to be a #GoOpen district. That means it uses openly licensed educational materials, which are free. The program allows materials to be replaced at any time. District Administration Magazine. When only 13 percent of sophomores at the Grandview School District in Washington passed the state math exams six years ago, administrators decided to develop their own curriculum.
For instance, leaders had concluded the textbooks they purchased didn’t adequately teach fractions and integers, leading to gaps in student learning. Grandview spent about $200,000 to hire English and math consultants to help the district’s instruction coaches write their own units. The goal was to better align instruction with students’ academic abilities. The district updated the homegrown curriculum each year with feedback from teachers. Plus, as student ability improved each year, the educators created more rigorous assignments, such as comparative essays. Does your faculty actually know what OER are? - eCampus News. Open educational resources (OER) are not quite the driving force that some advocates might believe, due in large part to the effort required to locate and evaluate them, according to a study of more than 3,000 U.S. faculty.
The study, Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, attempts to discern the process faculty use to select educational materials used in their courses, and it focuses in part on OER awareness and use. Though overall OER use is low overall, its use does increase somewhat for introductory-level courses with larger enrollments. Wizer.me. California Adopts #GoOpen, Picks Declara as Partner on Statewide Collaboration Platform. THE SUNSHINE STATE has taken some big steps towards becoming more acquainted with open education resources, or OERs.
This week, California became the 16th state to join the #GoOpen initiative, with the state's Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announcing that he and his team were also launching Collaboration in Common, an online professional learning community for teachers to exchange resources. Back in October 2015, the U.S.
Office of Education Technology's #GoOpen initiative kicked off with 10 school districts pledging to use OERs during the 2016-2017 school year. Since then, several more states have added themselves to the roster—now including California. "This is a critical effort to provide schools with high-quality instructional resources and the ability to easily share these resources and ideas with teachers and schools across the state and the country," Torlakson said. More Professors Know About Free Textbook Options, but Adoption Remains Low. Awareness of free or openly licensed educational resources, including textbooks and other teaching materials, has increased slightly over the past year, but according to a large-scale survey released on Tuesday, still only 6.6 percent of faculty members are "very aware" of them.
The survey and an accompanying report, "Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-16," includes results from a nationally representative sample of more than 3,000 full-time and part-time professors and was conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group. Tech Tip: Why you should use Open Educational Resources. Our teachers are better than any piece of technology, and certainly better than any textbook that we can buy.
We need to do more to tap into this valuable classroom resource. If we can harness this teacher expertise, our students certainly will benefit. Teachers who curate and cultivate a variety of Open Educational Resources -- both digital and in print -- give their students the best real-time educational opportunities. Cool Tool. Created to provide an alternative to traditional textbooks whose prices are rising farther and farther beyond what many students can afford to pay, OpenStax is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials.
Their free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and that they meet the scope and sequence requirements of the courses for which they are designed. They currently have 25 books available, covering the introductory college courses with the highest enrollments, and their library is still expanding. They have added two Advanced Placement® textbooks for high school classes, and they’re constantly working on innovative ways to improve their materials: interactive iBooks, tie-ins with MOOCS, original videos that visually explain key concepts, and more. Like this: How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom.
When Eric Langhorst teaches the Civil War to his eighth-graders at Discovery Middle School in Liberty, Missouri, he likes to give his students a taste of what Missouri was like in that era.
In addition to teaching about the big events found in any Civil War curriculum, like the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, Langhorst incorporates materials he has created about the guerrilla-style warfare more common in his region at that time. Edsurge. NAVIGATING THE JUNGLE: Amazon is testing a tool that it says can help teachers navigate the jungles of open educational resources (OER), reports EdWeek Market brief.
Speaking at a conference organized by the School Superintendents Association, Andrew Joseph, co-founder of TenMarks and Vice President of Strategic Relations for Amazon Education, shared details around a new platform, dubbed “Amazon Inspire,” that is set to launch by May. Earlier this month, the company invited select teachers for a private beta of the platform. 8 High-Quality OER Collections. Resource Spotlight 8 High-Quality OER Collections Finding high-quality open educational resources used to be a challenge, but a number of curated OER collections have made the task much easier for educators.
Here are eight sources that can help. 1. CK-12 Foundation. Open Education. Did you say free? Educators turn to textbooks that cost nothing, as U.S. Department of Education throws its weight behind them. The avant-garde of educators on social media went aflutter last week as the U.S. Department of Education announced new developments in its effort to assist schools that embark on plans to ditch old-school textbooks. Emblazoning their social media posts with #GoOpen, teachers, principals, advocacy organizations and trade groups rallied behind what the department described as “high-quality, openly-licensed educational resources” for K-12 schools.
Worth noting: These books and materials are free. Teachers Report: OER In; Textbooks Out. Research Teachers Report: OER In; Textbooks Out By Dian Schaffhauser03/09/16 More teachers said that technology has changed how they approach time management (93 percent) than how they approach instructional delivery (88 percent). It has also transformed how they handle parent communication.
A solid 7 in 10 reported that they now use tech to do that. Those results came out of a survey of nearly 1,000 American teachers who were contacted in January and February 2016 by TES Global, a company with a teacher community and marketplace. The survey found that most teachers have enough computers and tablets in the classroom.
This year far fewer teachers lack the Internet connectivity they want for getting their students online (16 percent) compared to last year (35 percent). Did you say free? Educators turn to textbooks that cost nothing, as U.S. Department of Education throws its weight behind them. #GoOpen States. Why #GoOpen? Openly licensed educational resources have enormous potential to increase access to high-quality education opportunities in the United States. Open Education. Edsurge. Open-source textbooks gain in push for affordability. STORRS, Conn. — The standard textbook for Fundamentals of General Chemistry I at the University of Connecticut has a list price of $303.
For students who use the version professor Edward Neth is preparing for the fall semester, the cost will be zero. An early adopter of open source textbooks, Neth said he turned to the new technology out of frustration with spiraling prices of commercial textbooks. “It’s seeing the costs go up every semester and almost feeling powerless,” Neth said. Schools maximize free content. When Tullahoma City Schools administrators started shopping for new social studies textbooks in 2013, they were disappointed to find only a few options aligned to the new Tennessee state standards.
No Excuse List. Why Open Education Matters. Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup. Resources by Topic: