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open

TEA Partners with Study Edge to Create OER

by Guest Blogger April 17, 2018

written by Guest Blogger

Today, more and more teachers are aware of Open Educational Resources (OER) and how OER can enhance instruction for little or no cost. However, many teachers may not be as familiar with the latest enhancement in OER: standards-aligned video content. In the spring of 2017, Study Edge was privileged to team up with the Texas Education Agency to develop videos and study guides covering each and every standard in Chemistry, Physics, Precalculus, and Statistics. These open-source materials are now available free of charge for all Texas teachers through the Texas Gateway.

All materials are aligned with the state standards (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)) and are composed of a video “book” that may be used to teach an entire course or to supplement traditional textbooks. The edtech company Study Edge creates high-quality, engaging instructional videos, study guides, and other content and technology in partnership with colleges and universities, individual schools and school districts, and state and federal agencies. Current partners include the State of Florida, the State of Mississippi, the State of Michigan, the State of South Carolina, and the New York City Department of Education, as well as more than 200 colleges and universities across the country; over 1,000,000 students have benefited from Study Edge’s resources, both inside and outside of the classroom.

This partnership between the Texas Education Agency and Study Edge is an indication of the bright future of Open Educational Resources. In addition to textbooks and curricula, OER is now interactive content that can enhance and even transform classroom instruction at no additional cost to schools. Study Edge is thrilled to be a part of this movement.

OER

What is a Study Edge video?

Study Edge produces highly-engaging, short educational videos featuring master teachers (Study Experts). Study Experts are full-time staff of Study Edge and include certified teachers (from various states), former university and community college professors, and former college learning center and university athletic association tutors. Click here to see a sampler of the videos developed for Texas students and teachers.

How can educators use Study Edge videos?

The Study Edge videos developed with TEA are designed to be flexible in use, allowing each teacher to customize the experience for the needs of his or her unique classroom. The videos cover all the standards and deliver content through an exciting and effective medium that keeps students engaged. Teachers can also use this content to supplement traditional textbooks to help students be more successful in their most challenging courses. There are many ways to use Study Edge videos to enhance instruction, and we encourage teachers to think of the Study Experts as their “virtual co-teachers.” You can rely on them both inside the classroom and when students go home at night.

How do teachers access the Study Edge videos?

There are a couple of ways that teachers can access the free Study Edge videos and study guides:

1) Through the Texas Gateway:

Once on the Gateway’s website, search “Study Edge’”in the top search menu and you will see a “book” for each of the four courses. You don’t have to use the whole book; you can use any “page” in the book very easily.
Each book is composed of chapters, each containing three to ten concept videos.
Under each video is a link to download (and print, if you’d like) the study guide PDF for that chapter (one PDF exists per chapter), which students can fill in as they follow along with the videos.

2) Through the Study Edge Chrome OS app: Click here for directions on how to download the app from Google Play to a compatible device.

Open the Study Edge Chrome OS app.
Select the appropriate subject from the dropdown menu.
Once you have selected a subject, you will see folders below a video player, one for each chapter. Inside each of the folders is a study guide PDF that can be downloaded and printed that students can fill in as they follow along with the videos in that chapter.

OER

You can also download the instructional flyer with information about accessing Study Edge material on the TEA Gateway.

Questions about Study Edge or their Partnership with TEA?

Please reach out with any questions, comments, or ideas to Study Edge! Don’t hesitate to send us an email…we’ll get back to you promptly! texas@studyedge.com.

This blog was written by Ethan Fieldman, the founder and president of Study Edge, based in Gainesville, Florida. More than 1,000,000 middle school, high school, and college students have enjoyed higher academic achievement through Study Edge-powered online supplemental instruction. An inventor with three patents and published educational researcher, Ethan also won the inaugural $50,000 Cade Prize for Innovation and was named to the White House’s Empact 100 in 2012 — the top 100 entrepreneurs in the United States, aged 30 and under. In his free time, Ethan enjoys reading (about education and technology), as well as spending time with his wife and son.

Photo Credit: Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

April 17, 2018 0 comments

CTO/CIO Educational Trends

Why and How El Paso ISD Went Open

by Guest Blogger December 22, 2017

written by Guest Blogger

Four years ago, my very first meeting with my new superintendent went something like this. Having never met him, I nervously walked into his office. After some introductions and minor chit-chat with a group of people around the table, we all sat down and he asked me this question: “Why do we buy textbooks?”

I struggled for a response and finally delivered the absolute worst answer that a superintendent hired to bring innovation to a school district could hear: “Because…we have always bought textbooks?”

Luckily, I believe that was the answer he was expecting to hear because no one else had offered a better answer. He looked at me and the other people in the room and asked rhetorically “Why do we pay for information that is already out there for free?”

It Starts by Asking Why

His question cuts to the heart of Open Educational Resources (OER) as learning tools. Why do we have to pay for information that is freely available? When you think about it, who owns the periodic table of elements? Who owns the water cycle? The list of prepositional phrases? Right triangles? The answer of course, is no one. That knowledge is in the public domain for everyone to learn and use. What we pay for is how that information is packaged and merchandised.

OER Our district’s journey into OER had begun. During that meeting, I was tasked with finding out how our district could save money by creating our own textbooks using as many OER materials as possible. The district had just gone through the adoption process for science instructional materials and had estimated it would cost close to $2 million for 18,000 students. What if we could use that textbook money in another way? Perhaps to purchase technology for students?

Investigating Options

I remembered meeting a young lady at the 2012 TCEA Convention who worked with an organization called OER ck12.org. Being a nerd, I recorded an interview with her and posted it online. Revisiting that video, I soon contacted the folks at ck12.org. They had textbooks in science and math through a system in which districts or schools could adopt and modify the texts to meet their instructional needs. This could enable us to add and subtract whatever we wanted (as long as the material was not copyrighted) and call them our own. The only caveat was that we had to share whatever we had created with the larger community.

Starting with Science

Within six months, EPISD had created, with the help of Ck12, four science textbooks: Integrated Physics and Chemistry, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. All were matched to our scope and sequences, as well as to the Texas standards. All were curated by our own teachers who knew our students’ needs better than any anonymous publisher in New York.

In the ensuing years, we have created more science, math, and social studies textbooks. All have been curated by EPISD teachers using OER collected from a wide variety of freely-available sources, such as Rice University’s “OpenStax” project.

Going Open Is a Process

Creating and adopting your own texts from OER material is not without headaches and risks. Teachers balked at first at our “free” textbooks, thinking something must be wrong with them. “Why are you using a free book?” was an often-heard question.

OER

Finding open resources for some courses is problematic, but with the U.S. Department’s #GoOPEN movement, of which EPISD is a proud founding member, more and more content is becoming available daily.

Have we achieved 100 percent OER nirvana? Not yet. There is still a lot of work to do, and we are iterating our processes as we go. But by starting down this path, we have begun a process that can only lead to more OER content being used. This in turn can have powerful benefits for our budget and ability to supply more technology resources in our schools.

You have to start somewhere. Which, now that I think about it, probably would have been a good answer way back in that first meeting.

This is a guest blog by Tim Holt. Holt is a 32-year educator with experience in classrooms, research, and instructional technology. He is a past president of TEC-SIG and recipient of the ISTE “Make it Happen” award. His blog, Holtthink was named one of the top 50 most influential ed tech blogs in 2014 and 2015. He lives in Canutillo, Texas and is the Director of Technology Pilots and Innovation for El Paso ISD.

December 22, 2017 0 comments

Advocacy Educational Trends

Texas Going Open, Thanks to Legislation

by Jennifer Bergland August 23, 2017

written by Jennifer Bergland

Last October, I wrote a blog post on Open Education Resources (OER). While doing the research, I realized that the state of Texas needed to do a better job of embracing and promoting these resources. This led to the drafting and eventually passing of several bills that will make it easier for teachers and districts to access and utilize high-quality open education resources. SB 810 defined OER as:

Resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that allows for free use,
reuse, modification, and sharing with others

What That Means

The key phrases in the definition are “free,” “reuse,” and “modify.” In order for a resource to be considered an open resource, it has to not only be free, but the user must also have the rights to reuse all or part of it for his own purpose. Let’s take, for example, a high school English literature teacher preparing to teach a unit on Shakespeare who finds the play As You Like It, on the OER Commons website. In order for this resource to truly be an openly-licensed material, the entity that is hosting this resource would grant the teacher the rights to use and adapt all or part of the play. You will notice that the license allows you to remix and share the resource so it qualifies as an OER.

The legal definition of open educational resources, as defined by SB 810, also identifies these resources as full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, or any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. As an example, Pearson has a sixth grade math course available which a district could use as is or adapt to meet the district’s specific learning goals. This course could easily be inserted into a district learning management system and be reworked and adjusted to meet the district’s curriculum design.

Texas Use of OER

The ability to take a resource and adapt it to meet a district’s scope and sequence and learning objectives is one of the reasons Texas districts have begun investigating and using open education resources. According to the most recent SpeakUp Survey, 42% of Texas administrators have implemented some form of OER within their district, and an additional 12% are considering it. 44% of the technology leaders in Texas consider OER to be one of the high growth digital initiatives.

SpeakUp Survey

These numbers will increase as some as the elements of SB 810 are implemented. TEA is required to have an OER repository that will be used by educators as a place to share materials created by districts, teachers, or the state. The new law also will create an instructional materials review service that will compare materials based on price, technical requirements, TEKS alignment, and editorial reviews. This service will help provide the quality control that has been missing for free materials.

Openstax Logo In addition, the state budget for the next two years includes $20 million for the state to arrange for an outside entity to produce open educational resources for the state’s use. It is expected that TEA will begin with instructional materials that meet the specifications for the English Language Arts adoption that will be implemented in the 2019-2020 school year. This would give districts the ability to use high-quality OER materials for this adoption, which has the potential to save them money. TEA recently announced the availability of some OER that were acquired by TEA for district use.

Open Educational Resources Blog Series

To help facilitate the exploration of open educational resources, I will write a monthly blog post that will hopefully answer the questions you may have. Some of the things I hope to address in the blog series are:

What districts in Texas are using open education resources and with what results
What resources are already available, both within and outside of Texas
Updates on the implementation of the OER bills that were recently passed
How to create your own OER
How to give attribution for open education resources and what the different licenses mean
The best practices in implementing OER.

These are just a few of the topics we will explore. Please use the comment section below to give me feedback or ask the burning questions you may have. See you next month!

August 23, 2017 0 comments

Content Areas Educational Trends

Inspiring OER with Amazon Inspire

by Miguel Guhlin July 8, 2016

written by Miguel Guhlin

This blog was updated on October 4, 2016 to include additional resources and information.

“High-quality OER (Open Education Resources) can save teachers significant time and effort,” points out this article at Edutopia, “on resource development and advance student learning inside and outside the classroom. Further, open sharing of resources has the potential to fuel collaboration, encourage the improvement of available materials, and aid in the dissemination of best practices.” Given that OER is increasingly available in education space, representing various “big players” like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s OpenEd.com, it’s worth taking a look at new offerings in this space.

What will these services mean for school districts and teachers? And, more important questions linger, such as, “Should teachers and school districts be trying to create their own content when so much is available online already? If not, who curates OER content?”

Let’s explore three current and future sources of open educational resources:

Amazon Announces Inspire

“Where big ideas take-off,” shares a video for Amazon’s new service, Inspire. You might think a free online lesson plan collection would be passé given that there are many other online lesson plan collections (as well as open educational resources available at no cost), but Amazon Inspire seeks to put a fresh face on digital lesson design, as well as open educational resources.

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse without charge. Open Educational Resources are different from other resources a teacher may use in that they have been given limited or unrestricted licensing rights. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. Source: OER Commons

Amazon Inspire seeks to make free resources, created by teachers and others, available for the purpose of improving learning outcomes. The new system will be searchable by grade level, type, and more. Contributors will be able to review and rate content made available online. Since Inspire is not yet available, teachers and contributors can request early access, and potential organizations can request to collaborate as well. Their invitation to collaborators appears below:

Are you a state, district, or school? An OER provider or a publisher with free content to share? We’ve collaborated with thousands of teachers and dozens of states, districts, and publishers during the private beta of Amazon Inspire. Now it’s your turn. Help us to provide teachers everywhere with access to a large and diverse selection of free digital teaching resources.

Of course, Amazon is neither the first or the last to the OER space.

Google OER Custom Search

Until Amazon’s Inspire OER clearinghouse is ready, be aware that there are ample locations to find OERs. One place that you can look is a Google custom search. For example, a quick search on blended learning yielded these results:

OER

How many of these resources remain current however? Keeping it all updated remains a key obstacle according to JISC’s web site:

Sustainability of OER release is currently a significant issue for institutions around the globe and evidence of benefits must be clarified if resources are to be made available for continued release. (Source: JISC)

If you explore The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource, you will probably be impressed (as I was) by the breadth and depth of the content available. Now imagine maintaining this content, updating it to reflect the latest information (e.g. Google Forms and Drive updates may not be reflected on this page fast enough to be useful).

As LeiLani Cauthen (@learningcounsel – The Learning Counsel) pointed out recently (paraphrased in my notes below) at a San Antonio, Texas event, teachers are essentially competing against a global network of knowledge workers. Small teams of teachers in their respective classrooms are unable to keep up with the constantly changing flood of content, apps, and information washing over schools in waves.

Digital curriculum and LMS companies are dis-intermediating teachers because there’s no possible way for teachers to design the mobile learning experiences students need at the speed they need to. Teachers are competing against a global network of knowledge. Some district curriculum leaders think they can simply digitize their resources and teach teachers to use a variety of digital apps. But organizing and managing this for each teacher is impossible for them. It’s a never-ending task that teachers have no time for or expertise (most were not taught to be instructional designers of curriculum that is multi-sensory and mobile), and, as such, more information is needed.

OER Commons

Featuring an easy-to-use interface, the OER Commons presents educators
with a variety of open educational resources. As you can see from the results below, there is content available in a variety of areas. OER

FormSwift Common Core Lesson Plans

Another resource for creating customized lesson plans is from startup FormSwift. They provide a very nice-looking and easy-to-use template for making an ELA, math, or science lesson plan based on the Common Core standards. The free site allows you to edit a PDF or Word document that can then be printed or emailed in to a supervisor.

Conclusion

Open Educational Resources certainly have great potential for educators, providing content and lessons that teachers can adapt. Yet the question remains. Even though OERs are becoming available, who evaluates these and makes sure they connect to the district’s curricular goals? And do teachers really have the time to curate content coming from multiple vendors?

OER Apps and Resources

MERLOT OER Search (iOS) – MERLOT Search provides easy-to-use access to the MERLOT database of 48,000+ higher education resources. MERLOT’s Open Education Resource collection has been curated by subject matter experts, many with comments provided by members who have used them and often with learning exercises attached for use in the classroom.
OER Search (iOS) – OER Search provides a quick and easy way to discover high quality open educational resources that are freely available online. Search from 30,000 resources that have been curated by educators from over 300 collections and providers.
Creating and Sharing Open Educational Resources (iOS) – This nonlinear collection of multi-touch resource books are designed to support educators who are authoring content and/or guiding learners who are authoring content for publication. This course is designed as a collection of resources to help the teacher and student navigate through open educational resources.

July 8, 2016 0 comments