Implementing Common Core State Standards with Open Educational Resources (OER): Support for Training Partners and States

Open Educational Resources (OER), licensed and made freely available online, support knowledge sharing and continuous improvement by leveraging educator expertise and experience. ISKME’s OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) offers a comprehensive infrastructure for teachers and curriculum experts to collaborate around the use, evaluation, and improvement of high-quality educational resources, including a tool for Common Core alignment, and Open Author, an integrated, easy-to-use digital resource authoring and remixing environment for teachers.

ISKME offers partners expertise in the development and delivery of Common Core Standards trainings for states and local education agencies nationwide to support teacher professional learning and collaboration using OER.

ISKME services include designing and implementing training sessions for educators to effectively engage with OER and Common Core resources in schools and classrooms, as well as the technological tools to do so; follow-up virtual supports for teachers and curriculum specialists; expert OER curatorial services and support for resource identification; and a premiere online toolset and digital library.

Advantages of Engaging with ISKME and OER Commons:

●      OER Commons and Open Author are freely available to everyone, as are resources aggregated on OER Commons

●      Open content can be customized to fit Common Core alignment, state-specific requirements, and particular classroom and learner needs

●      Open Author is an inclusively designed environment for building out lesson plans and OER, authored materials can be subtitled and are readable in screen readers and accessible using a wide range of assistive technologies

●      ISKME’s professional development facilitators train participants on essential sets of social and digital learning skills applied to OER, including the use of web-based tools for identifying and adapting existing content to fit Common Core State Standards

●      ISKME curatorial services assist in identifying appropriate resources and supporting the development of Common Core content policies for states and local education agencies

ISKME’s OER and Common Core Trainings focus on:

●      The Open Movement: Why share? ISKME’s trainings connect current teaching practices and content policies with participatory and design-thinking frameworks and offer activities to advance educators’ comfort and skill with collaboration and sharing.

●      Open Content, Sharing and Licensing: What are OER? ISKME’s trainings feature use cases for adaptation of existing content in the context of continuous improvement and reuse, and offer an overview of relevant intellectual property, licensing, and content adoption and adaptation issues, and why this is important for Common Core implementation.

●      Teaching and Common Core OER Implementation: ISKME focuses on OER identification through an overview of metadata and search strategies; content evaluation through the use of Quality and Common Core Alignment rubrics and tools; basic skills for tagging and creating a collection of OER content.

●      OER Content Creation: ISKME provides an introduction to the authoring environment, Open Author, to create freely accessible learning materials and adapt existing materials to Common Core standards; Open Author and OER Commons offer tools for making content more accessible for students with special needs.

●      Common Core Collections: ISKME is available to work collaboratively with state and agency content leads to collect appropriate OER or to assist in development of a custom landing page for teachers to freely access content tagged by state or agency (available starting January 2013).

Service Offerings for Organizations and State and Local Education Agencies:

Our comprehensive package of professional development trainings, curatorial and development services, outlined below, is available and customizable to your organization’s needs.

●      Training Workshops (from 2-hour introduction to 2-day intensive)

●      Summer Teacher Academies (2 to 5 days)

●      Virtual Supports (for 3, 6 or 12 months following trainings)

●      OER Commons Membership and Basic User Support (unlimited)                                           

●      Librarian/Curriculum Specialist content evaluation and alignment               

●      Open Author content creation and hosting (unlimited)                                                           

●      Development of Custom Landing Page                                              

About ISKME

ISKME is a global nonprofit dedicated to collaboration and change in the education sector. Founded in 2002, ISKME has emerged as a leader in research on social learning, open education resources (OER), and improved information access and knowledge sharing. ISKME also develops open and distributed knowledge sharing tools that accelerate problem-solving, and builds capacity for large-scale educational change through innovative trainings and professional development.

Since 2007, ISKME’s OER Commons has served as an intermediary for open and freely available content providers and emerging open education practitioners at all levels. Engaging with over 350 OER content providers from around the world, ISKME supports knowledge sharing and access to teaching and learning materials, strategies, and curricula online. The site has over 27,000 registered users, averages 50,000 visits a month from 193 countries. ISKME was named one of five global innovators in education for OER Commons, by the Tech Museum Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity. Additionally ISKME’s OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative won the international 2011 OPAL Awards for Quality and Innovation through Open Educational Practices. As such, ISKME’s training and professional development supports teachers and schools in effective uses of digital content as part of a larger model for systemic change in education through knowledge sharing. ISKME is building partnerships with leaders of teacher education centers, districts, and schools to accomplish this goal.

Please reach Amee Godwin at ISKME to discuss your specific needs: amee@iskme.org.