#OER Adoption in K12 - slotting into technology

The recent report by the  Babson Survey Research Group, What We Teach: K-12 School District Curriculum Adoption Process, 2017 is a very useful starting point for looking at OER adoption in K12 school districts. The reported finding that "Being able to slot any new curricula materials into the district's existing technology is critical across all types and sizes of districts" was especially interesting because of the lack of specificity cited about what it means to 'slot curricula materials into the districts existing technology.'

Slotting curricula into existing technology can mean a lot of different things.  For instance, the curricula material can be:

A: presented by the teacher via a digital projector or white board  with student work collected and scored on paper;

B: presented in html and viewed with wifi devices with student work collected and scored on paper;

C: presented in OneNote and viewed with wifi devices and student work collected and scored via OneNote via the wifi devices;

D. presented in Google docs with student work collected and scored via Google docs;

E. presented in an LMS with student work collected via the tools available in the LMS.

There are other possible combinations of using technology, too. An alternative might be to use the centuries old technology of presenting the OER curricula materials on paper with student work collected on paper. It is unlikely that if the curricula material is presented on paper that student work will be collected and scored via electronic technology. Presenting the curricula materials on paper with student work collected on paper has the advantage of requiring the least amount of professional development for teachers. Paper versions are impractical, however, for revising, retaining, remixing, reusing, and redistributing the OER curricula materials. If a district is not taking advantage of the 5 Rs and buying printed copies of OER materials, they're simply buying the cheapest version of curricula materials available.

Presenting the curricula materials in an LMS and collecting student work via the tools available in the LMS is the method that affords the most flexible use of revising, retaining, remixing, reusing, and redistributing the curricula materials.  Using an LMS also enables multiple methods of collaboration and assessment that aren't available with the other methods. Of course, the issue with using an LMS is that it requires more professional development than any of the other methods. That's why we created the Stone Arch Bridge Initiative for Education Resources, SABIER. The idea is to take the money that’s currently being spent on textbooks and instead use it to pay for teachers to acquire the training and skill to make full use of the collaboration and assessment features of the LMS and to maximize the permissions of OER for revising, retaining, remixing, reusing, and redistributing. 

The Babson report's finding that there are more districts using OER than there are districts who understand the meaning of OER suggests that there's plenty of work yet to be done.

OpenUpResources's Not Quite OER Common Cartridges

The recent Edscoop piece about OpenUpResources's Illustrative Mathematics is one of the best that I've seen on that great new offering.

It would be a service to educators, however, if the piece had explained in more detail the idea of platform neutrality. The suggestion appears to be that teaching and learning is the same when content is presented as:

A: Paper with student work collected and scored on paper

B: html pages with student work collected and scored on paper

C: OneNote with student work collected and scored via OneNote

D: an LMS with student work collected either on paper or via the tools available in the LMS

I have yet to get a look at the files that OpenUpResources are promising via Common Cartridge, but how the files are structured will make a difference as to how  easy they are to implement in various LMSs. Larry Singer, the OpenUpResources CEO, called me this afternoon to explain that I would need to sign some agreement that their very expensive lawyers were drafting before they could make the Common Cartridges available to me. Apparently those very expensive lawyers are having a hard time drafting that agreement. Making people sign agreements is not exactly in the spirit of open educational resources, either. He also explained to me that OpenUpResources thinks that professional development is the same no matter which of the five types of instructional models above are used. He further explained that it didn't matter to them because OpenUpResources is just a broker of professional development; they don't actually provide it.

It appears that Google Classroom has been left out of OpenUpResources’s mix, too, because I have yet to see a way to import either OneNote or Common Cartridge files into Classroom. Google Classroom is the most widely used platform (it's not really an LMS) so I'm not sure why OpenUpResources chose to have a OneNote version and not a Google Classroom version. It appears that Microsoft may have been able to exert a little influence despite the claim of platform neutrality.

SABIER will be creating versions of OpenUpResource's Illustrative Mathematics utilizing all of the features for discussion and collaboration in addition to the various methods of doing assessment that are available with Moodle. We chose to create the LMS versions in Moodle because it's the LMS that is truly open source and it is the most widely used LMS in K12 globally. Because it's open source and has an open repository that is capable of maintaining full courses, users of other LMSs such as Schoology and Canvas will be able to download the full LMS courses and convert them to their LMS including the collaborations and assessments.