In the search for something new in the sphere of Educational Technologies I have discovered an idea of openly licensed educational resources, which are learning materials that can be used for teaching, learning, and assessment without cost. They can be modified and redistributed without violating copyright laws. The US Department of Education’s #GoOpen campaign encourages states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational materials to transform teaching and learning. It is a great opportunity to improve students' learning in their school.
The Office of Educational Technology on their official webpage of Open Education claim that "educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information."
They describe how resources that are openly licensed benefit schools in a number of ways, but most notably they help to:
- Increase Equity – All students have access to high quality learning materials that have the most up-to-date and relevant content because openly licensed educational resources can be freely distributed to anyone.
- Save Money – Switching to educational materials that are openly licensed enables schools to repurpose funding spent on static textbooks for other pressing needs, such as investing in the transition to digital learning. In some districts, replacing just one textbook has made tens of thousands of dollars available for other purposes.
- Keep Content Relevant and High Quality – Traditional textbooks are perpetually outdated, forcing districts to re-invest significant portions of their budgets on replacing them. The terms of use of openly licensed educational resources allows educators to maintain the quality and relevance of their materials through continuous updates.
- Empower Teachers – Openly licensed educational resources empower teachers as creative professionals by giving them the ability to adapt and customize learning materials to meet the needs of their students without breaking copyright laws.
Katrina Schwartz in her latest article "How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom" (July 11th, 2016) discusses the implementation of #GoOpen Campaign and experience of teachers and whole schools who are using it.
Keeping information fresh and up to date in a quickly moving world is claimed to be one of the biggest reasons why districts in the US are starting to get more serious about the power of teacher-created open resources. Districts typically adopt new textbooks on a five-year cycle. At that point, some of the information is outdated. Another reason why teachers are excited about this movement is the ability to adapt resources for their own use. If a teacher believes a lesson plan found online is not completely aligned with the standards taught in his state, he can modify it until he is comfortable with it.
However, many teachers still have big questions about open educational resources that will determine how many of them choose to adopt this approach to teaching and curriculum. Teachers are familiar with the amount of time and energy it takes to create good learning materials because many already curate and remix lessons. As the infrastructure to search and share those lesson plans becomes more robust, some teachers wonder whether they should share lessons they created with the world when they were never compensated for the time they put into making them. Others worry about issues of intellectual copyright. Despite that US governments supports the idea of open educational resources.
The Office of Educational Technology is supporting districts to #GoOpen in a few ways. First, staff members are trying to ensure that there is infrastructure in place to make teacher-created materials more discoverable. Amazon has brought its recommending and search prowess to the project with Inspire, a platform where teachers can upload their lessons, tag them and make them freely available to other teachers around the country. Inspire is still in beta, with several district around the country testing its functionality. The plan is for the Inspire platform to be compatible with third-party learning management systems that many schools already use, so teachers can search the learning registry from within their school’s platform.
This is a great example how government initiative can support learning and teaching and foster progress in the country. It can become a model for other countries to follow. And, I hope, Kazakhstan can soon adapt it for our system of education in order to popularize open educational resources.
References:
Office of Educational Technology. (n.a.). Open Education: Openly Licensed Educational Resources. Retrieved from: http://tech.ed.gov/open-education/
Schwartz, Katrina. (2016). How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom. MindShift. Retrieved from: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/07/11/how-teacher-created-free-online-resources-are-changing-the-classroom/
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