OpenEd2026 kicked off earlier this week with a webinar entitled, Part 3. Working Together Across the OER Ecosystem. (I don't know what parts 1 and 2 were.) The subtitle was Finding Common Ground in K-12 and Higher Education. The suggested areas of common ground were Career Pathways/CTE, Dual Enrollment/Dual Credit, and AI Guidance / Implementation. The first two are really just Higher Ed issues that impact a small but important segment of K-12. I did a presentation five years ago at OpenEd21 with Lisa Lucas Hurst about using OER for Dual Enrollment/Dual Credit. It’s a great idea, but I’m not convinced Higher Ed is really interested in doing what needs to be done to make it work. Nobody had anything to say about AI Implementation during the webinar, so.... I have some ideas about how to do that, but it’s going to take a willingness to go offline, and there are few takers in the U.S. so far.
I’ve been an advocate of OER for over fifteen years. OER arrived with the promise that high-quality, standards-aligned textbooks, lesson plans, and materials would be free, open, and legally adaptable for every classroom. Some OER materials are now available, but wide use of OER is stalled because there is no unified, scalable, openly licensed way to assess student learning. And, assessing student learning is what K-12 is all about, but to give a test or even a formative assessment, a teacher moves open materials into Canvas, Schoology, a proprietary assessment system, or Google Classroom, and it stops being open.
As I argued in my post on Delmar Larsen's "National Priority for Open Education", open content hasn't displaced the infrastructure underneath it. The textbook is free; the system that enables the learning isn't. In K-12, Google controls most of that system, and Google is "kinda free," but definitely not open. Security makes things worse. When materials are public, a published answer key is a five-second web search away, so creators lock high-stakes assessments behind teacher-only firewalls. The testing layer of an open curriculum ends up closed.
Iowa is an example of how this goes wrong. The state spent $17 million in federal funds on full-year, LMS-delivered OER courses, but the openly licensed courses were never actually shared openly, and no professional development was funded to help teachers use them. Good content is not enough. As I wrote in Open Infrastructure has to Include People, training and support are part of the infrastructure, and the know-how has to stay with the institutions that depend on it rather than leave with a vendor contract.
Open, performance-based assessment (PBA) is the direction I favor. Students defend portfolios, conduct scientific inquiry, or tackle real-world modeling tasks scored with Creative Commons rubrics. But the logistics are brutal. An LMS grades a multiple-choice quiz in a millisecond; scoring thirty portfolios with a multi-trait rubric can take a teacher ten to fifteen hours. In an era of historic teacher burnout, that is a non-starter without real support. And for teachers in different schools to score the same project the same way, districts must invest in ongoing professional development and calibration, which most public systems lack the budget to do. PBA works only if capacity-building is funded alongside it. Using an open-source system like the one Andrew Lyman Butler explains here to do assessment is another good option, but that too will require investment in teacher professional development.
U.S. institutional architecture works against open assessment, too. States are pushed toward standardized data, and portfolios don't aggregate into statewide spreadsheets. So states stay tied to centralized multiple-choice exams. The providers of those exams are dominated by venture capital groups which have a strong financial incentive to keep assessment proprietary, centralized, and machine-gradable, and the lobbying power to keep teacher-led or open frameworks out of state adoption. Only a handful of U.S. public schools systematically use a truly open, Creative Commons-licensed mastery assessment system. Most schools still aren’t even using OER textbooks, and almost all use premium, proprietary, closed testing.
Any real fix has to pass the design test I proposed in this post: can it work in a classroom with no internet? In U.S. K-12, that isn’t a hypothetical. There are still too many classrooms and homes where connectivity is slow, metered, shared, or missing. Meanwhile, more states are limiting screen time, which makes always-on, cloud-dependent platforms a poor bet for the long term. Here is what passing the test requires.
A school or district should be able to run open assessment on hardware it controls. Students and teachers connect to it over the school’s own wireless network, with no internet needed. Small offline Moodle servers already do this in classrooms in northern Ghana, where the Sopala Project has paired them with local-language content. Nothing about the approach is specific to Ghana. A U.S. district can run the same kind of server. It also keeps student data inside the building instead of in a vendor’s cloud.
Offline can’t mean a ‘less than’ system. Randomized practice, auto-graded quizzes, and teacher gradebooks should work without a connection, and results should sync when a connection is available, whether that’s overnight, at a library, or on a hotspot. The same logic extends to the home. Parents should be able to load content onto their own phones when they’re at school. That gives parents a way to see what their children are learning and to help with homework, even when the home has no broadband. A homework gap that depends on home internet is a design flaw. Elementary teachers, who work most directly with families where English is not the first language, would benefit first.
The content and the assessment infrastructure built directly on it should carry a license that keeps them free to adapt and redistribute but blocks commercial capture, such as CC BY-NC. Public schools can then deploy, translate, and modify the system without worrying that a company will repackage their work behind a subscription. Vendors can still sell support, training, and compatible tools to those who want them. They just can’t turn the core into a toll road.
Every district needs trained, paid facilitators, such as a teacher-leader or technology coordinator with time and a stipend, who can set up the local server, help colleagues build and adapt materials, and work with families who are new to the system. This role can be what media specialists used to do before IT took over materials. This is infrastructure, not a nice-to-have. State education agencies, districts, and federal programs already fund professional development, and some of that money should be directed here. Without paid facilitators, an open system only serves the schools that already have technical expertise, which compounds existing inequities.
Each trained teacher should add to what came before. When a fourth-grade teacher in one district translates a unit into Spanish, fixes a confusing question, or adds a better set of practice problems, that improvement should flow back to a shared, openly licensed repository that every other district can pull from, including districts that sync only occasionally. Facilitators are the natural link in this chain. They gather local improvements, check them, and share them, so the system gets better with every teacher who uses it instead of resetting each time a vendor changes its product.
Until we have a secure, scalable way to measure mastery without surrendering to proprietary vendors, it will remain an incomplete experiment, a well-intentioned supplement rather than a systemic replacement. Free textbooks and lesson plans are great, but the part of K-12 that carries consequences are the quizzes, the unit tests, and the evidence that a student has learned something. “Secure” means student data stays under the control of the school and family. “Scalable” means the system works for a rural district with one part-time technology coordinator as well as for a large urban one, and keeps working on the school’s own hardware when the connection drops.
And don’t look to higher ed for help. Homework and testing platforms from Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill, Lumen, and many others are woven into course after course. Even where the textbook is free, open adoptions often depend on them for grading. Higher ed has learned to live with that dependency in order to ameliorate the brutally regressive practice of requiring students to pay for textbooks. Higher Ed starts with the best-connected learners, not with the K-12 classrooms where the hard problems are. K-12 has young children, shared devices, uneven home access, thin technical staffing, and strict privacy obligations. Solve for where it’s hardest and let Higher Ed adopt what works.
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