CUE 17: Go Open!

#GoOpen is a movement started in the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology nearly two years ago. The idea is to encourage the development, adoption, and use of "open educational resources" (OER) by schools, districts, and states, as an alternative to traditional textbook adoptions. As of today, departments of education in 20 states have pledged to adopt and implement a statewide technology strategy that includes the use of openly licensed resources as a central component, develop as statewide repository solution for openly licensed resources, and develop the capacity to publish OER to the central Learning Registry. In addition, there are 107 districts around the country who have joined as "Launch Districts", committing to develop a strategy for the implementation of openly licensed educational materials, and to replace at least one textbook with openly-licensed materials in the next year. In Southern California, some of those districts are Huntington Beach Union, Riverside Unified, Coachella Valley Unified, Cajon Valley Union, Carlsbad Unified, Coronado Unified, Fallbrook Union, Grossmont Union, San Diego Unified, and Vista Unified.

The #GoOpen session at CUE was presented by Kristina Peters, a K-12 Open Education Fellow at the Office of Educational Technology. She emphasized that OER means more than simply "free"; the resources must be licensed for reuse as well.

There are multiple repositories of OER available to teachers, and others coming soon. One of the biggest and best-known is OER Commons (oercommons.org). Another is Gooru (gooru.org); Amazon, Edmodo, and Microsoft have platforms coming soon.

In an era of insufficient funding for schools combined with networks of professional teachers collaborating remotely, the need for textbooks published by giant for-profit companies is gone. #GoOpen shows a way towards a new model for providing resources to teachers and students. A fellow attendee at the CUE session put it best when he commented that we expect students to do research and find resources themselves rather than having it handed to them; as teachers and administrators, we should model that process ourselves.