Saturday, November 19, 2022

An Open letter to the #GoOpen Network

How can more state departments of education and school districts be encouraged to begin using OER curricula more than they are currently doing? Maybe this will happen without any controversies. Maybe there won’t be any politics involved. Maybe this will happen very organically and blissfully. Maybe all of the people whose current livelihoods in all of the state departments of education and school districts depend on the distribution and monitoring of proprietary curricula will just wake up one morning and say - “I think we should not keep doing what we’ve always done and that I’ve become recognized for leading. I want to do something completely new and innovative.” Maybe.


Maybe a state department of education other than Iowa’s will decide it wants to spend $17 million dollars to create openly licensed curricula that can be readily used on an LMS like Iowa has done. Maybe they’ll make that curricula for Math, Science, Social Studies, and ELA in grades 6-12  available to all other districts like an open license requires, which Iowa hasn’t done for some inexplicable reason. Maybe.


I don’t think any of the above is likely. Getting more state departments of education and school districts using OER more frequently and more effectively is going to require some conflict and some risk taking. Somebody might need to risk being wrong.


Saturday, November 5, 2022

Update to Iowa Dept. of Ed. Squanders $17million on #OER

 Here are a few more details about my previous post. The previous post was the culmination of many email exchanges, phone calls, and Zoom meetings with Iowa Department of Education staff.  About a year ago, SABIER started planning PD courses for Iowa schools.  We would be focusing on showing teachers how to create equity in materials using middle school math OER courses as described here.  (Notice on that page that Iowa AEA Online has been an acknowledged partner of SABIER since October of 2021. We've done various exchanges since 2016.)  The content we would be using would be digital OER versions of Illustrative Mathematics for middle schools. In 2020, SABIER created OER LMS courses using GeoGebra's OER digital app version of Illustrative Mathematics embedded in open source OER Moodle courses.  That work is described here in a CC Medium post. (If you want more info on OER please see this from UNESCO.)

In March of 2022, I learned that the Iowa Department of Education had created revisions of the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum in Canvas courses.  I asked to talk to the person in charge of the IM course development for the Department because I didn't want to pursue Professional Development for Iowa teachers that didn't include work that the Iowa Department of Education had been doing. I was introduced to the head of math for the state of Iowa. She did a screen share and showed me a couple of pages of one of the courses they had created in Canvas. It seemed to be very thorough and appeared to be very well done. I said, "That's wonderful, please, send me a copy and I'll combine it with the work we did with GeoGebra and give teachers some great options." She said she couldn't give me access. She said that while showing me this screen - https://elearningcentral.iowa.gov/course-repository/ilc-8th-grade-math-full-year , the screen that very clearly displays the CC BY license, a license that permits free sharing of material.  I was confused as to why she thought she couldn't give me access.

It gets worse. The director of  Iowa AEA Online has not yet been given get access. Iowa AEA Online has been leading support for digital learning in Iowa schools for over fifteen years. They're really good at it, and have nine offices scattered around the state. I repeat; they haven't been given access yet to the digital OER courses created with $17 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Education. And, the IDE hasn't budgeted for professional development for the new digital curriculum being delivered via an LMS for the first time in most Iowa middle school math classrooms.


This initiative by the Iowa Department of Education is important for several reasons:

It's the largest amount of money spent by any government entity anywhere on K-12 OER curriculum, and it's the first major expenditure at any level by any government entity on full course OER delivered via an LMS. That's a big and important innovation. Iowa should be proud, although I don't think they actually understood what they were doing and what the ramifications were. I strongly suspect they were led down this path by Instructure, the purveyors of Canvas. As is, this initiative will be a huge boon for Instructure-Canvas. Even if  the courses were moved to a free open-source system it will still be a huge revenue source for Instructure because lots of K-12 districts would rather write checks than own their own content and processes.

There are at least four for-profit companies that have taken the OER Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, the OER OpenSciEd curriculum, the OER Great Minds curriculum and the others that are included in Iowa eLearning Central and put them into their proprietary LMS like platforms.  Two of those companies have been acquired by venture capital companies in the last two years. Venture capitalists have not historically been interested in K-12 instructional materials. The reason they're investing is because the course content for the middle school math content alone on Iowa eLearning Central if sold to all schools in the U.S. is equal to about $450,000,000.00 - half a $Billion. 

The Iowa Department of Education could become the leaders in implementing this curriculum nationwide. Teachers need to be better supported and they should be paid to learn new skills using digital curriculum and digital tools that are capable of making curriculum more equitable. Those $billions should be going to paying more teachers more money and enhancing their skills. Teachers can lead the needed equity efforts using OER curriculum and digital tools. That's why I founded SABIER six years ago. 

Here are some supporting documents:

My letter to the U.S. Department of Education Inspector General. Their response to me was to contact the program officer. I've been told that Lauren Golubski, lauren.golubski@ed.gov, is the program officer. They haven't returned my calls or emails.

Here's a response I received from the Iowa Department of Education's General Counsel, Thomas Mayes after about a dozen or so calls and email to various people at the IDE.