Open Education 2015

The K-12 OER Collaborative is an initiative led by a group of 12 states with the goal of creating comprehensive, high-quality, open educational resources (OER) that are aligned with state learning standards. The project will produce full-course OER for grades K-12 in mathematics and English language arts. These materials, licensed using CC BY, will be available in multiple formats and on multiple platforms. See http://k12oercollaborative.org/

The Collaborative team will describe their plans for evaluating the impact of the project and lead a discussion with attendees about differing ways to measure the impact. The full materials will not yet be released by the time of the conference, so the feedback from this session will be important as the Collaborative refines its evaluation strategy.

Key issues include:

* Tracking implementation and dissemination of the materials in multiple formats.

* In many cases, schools will be replacing existing materials with OER (Level 0, in Wiley's Remix Hypothesis - http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3813). What evaluation methods work better for these implementations?

* Measuring the potential impact on student achievement using state assessment data.

* When the materials are adapted, how do you evaluate student performance when the materials may differ from district-to-district, teacher-to-teacher?

* Are there ways to measure and evaluate the community that grows up around the materials?