Open Education 2015

K-12 educators using OER rarely have the chance to connect with others outside of their district to discuss OER. This session will explore an attempt to create regional communities of OER practitioners.

School districts across Washington state are beginning to use OER as part of their instructional material strategies. In order to help school districts address shared implementation considerations, the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is facilitating the development of OER User Groups focused on a particular open curriculum or content area.

User groups are a way for district curriculum, technology, and administration leaders across the state to convene both online and in person to address issues such as:

* maintaining fidelity of implementation with highly adaptable resources

* addressing equity of access with various OER distribution platforms

* understanding how OER fit into instructional materials approval and adoption pathways and how they encourage a paradigm shift from the traditional adoption cycle

* meeting professional development needs

* sharing teacher created materials to support implementation and understanding open licensing for those materials

* measuring the efficacy of an open curriculum and sharing those findings with other districts

OSPI, in partnership with Washington state educational service districts, assembled a statewide task force to create a vision and collaboratively design and develop the structure and management of the first OER User's Group, focused on the EngageNY mathematics instructional materials. Additional OER User Groups will address other content areas. These support systems will allow for rich cross-district discussion about the nuts and bolts of using OER as core instructional material in the classroom.