I’ve been working for the last couple of months on a new project: a K-12 open educational resources (OER) online community of practice.
It’s not really done yet. In fact, it may never be done. Which makes unveiling it publicly a little scarey, but here we are.
This project came out of a realization that while many in K-12 now know about OER, not that many are actually using it. As a believer in peer learning and support, I thought that an online place where teachers might collaborate on this could be helpful. (Along the way, a group of us debated whether the world needed one more online community and other design issues, all of which was very helpful in thinking this through.)
A premise for this project is that we’re hoping to provide utility for those who are just getting started with OER, not necessarily those already entrenched in using it. As such, you won’t find a lot of information on license nuances, repositories, metadata, interoperability, or similar issues. Instead, we’ve chosen to start with these areas:
- Getting started with OER
- Using OER in the classroom (ELA, math, science, social studies)
- OER in online learning, and
- Open textbooks
(Are these the right categories? I don’t know, but they’re flexible to be changed as needed.)
For each of these categories, we offer a few resources to get started, a discussion board space, and a collection of related tweets, posts, etc. from the web.
What can you do to participate in this?
- Visit and join the community.
- Post to the discussion boards.
- Suggest blogs or folks on Twitter that we should follow and include here.
- Tag your own related posts with #oer and/or #k12opened.
- Make suggestions for how we might improve the site and make it more useful to those just getting started with OER.
- Tell your friends!
I am excited about embarking on this new adventure and hope you’ll join us!