OER Kicked to the Curb

It looks like OER has been kicked to the curb. In early 2022, The U.S. Department of Education turned the responsibility of promoting open educational resources (OER) over to ISKME. Recently, the Go Open National Network, the ISKME entity that is the steward of the Go Open Movement, offered a webinar on the 2024 National Education Technology Plan (NETP.) They tried to connect the NETP to OER but weren’t able to explain why OER isn’t even mentioned in the The Plan. 

 In the 113h pages of the 2024 NETP all kinds of things related to education and technology are mentioned. It’s a 113 page laundry list of everything you might want to include in education technology related topics EXCEPT OER. One of the panelists from North Carolina, a state that has theoretically embraced OER, said in the webinar that only about 20% of their teachers visit the state's repository of OER. Visiting the repository, of course, doesn’t mean that the Resources are actually being used in the classroom. The panelist then admitted that it doesn’t appear that there is adequate support in schools for teachers to become proficient at finding, adapting, and using OER. 

The NETP features a few hundred mentions of UDL, a proprietary framework that also doesn't talk about OER. If you don't have permission and don't know how to modify educational resources at the classroom level and don't have adequate support, you can't really Design or USE content that provides universal ACCESS. 

 In the webinar, I asked - Where is OER mentioned in the NETP other than as an anecdote? The response from one of the primary authors of The Plan was that it was a framework or a vision of what they’d like to see in classrooms and what we need to focus on in order for that vision to come to life. But regarding OER, the author said there’s other places where things like OER can be connected to the NETP. Which means that the NETP doesn’t explicitly connect OER to the vision of what they’d like to see in the classroom. Go someplace else to find out about how OER can reduce the divides of Use, Design, and Access in teaching and learning; it’s not covered in the NETP.