Barbara Soots - Open Education Conference, Nov. 18-20, 2015, Vancouver, Canada.

1. OER User Groups for K-12 Educators
Barbara Soots
Open Educational Resources Program Manager
Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction
Washington State
barbara.soots@k12.wa.us

2. Alignment to learning standards for state and district
Fidelity of implementation
Equity of access
Policy issues with regard to adoption
Instructional Materials in K-12:
A Different World
Photo by Nina Matthews Photography– CC BY

3. Rainbow by Pepijn Schmitz – CC BY NC SA
Cost shift from textbooks to other critical areas
Up to date, innovative materials
Collaboration and partnerships
Continual quality improvement and standards alignment
Support for independent and differentiated learning
Solve legal concerns with distribution and adaptation
Benefits of OER

4. Instructional Material Considerations
New learning standards, frameworks, and assessments

5. “The legislature finds the state's
recent adoption of new learning
standards provides an
opportunity to develop a library
of high-quality, openly licensed
K-12 courseware that is aligned
with these standards.”
Washington State Capitol by Piutus – CC BY
Washington OER Project

6. District questions…
6Question Mark by Alexander Drachmann – CC BY SA
What should our vetting process look like?
How well do different OER platforms work
when the device is offline (for students who
do not have Internet access)?
How do we provide support for
staff on how to review, choose
and update an OER resource?
So many OER textbook publications are paper intensive but we need to print
to ensure equity of access for our students. How can this be overcome?
What are the implications of using OER
with respect to current district policies?
How do different OER delivery platforms
work with our existing LMS?
How we can effectively access high quality,
up to date curriculum materials?
How do we locate other districts doing
similar work to collaborate and share?
If OER are adopted, how often would they
need to be reviewed to ensure that they
continue to meet the established need? Should OER be considered supplemental?

7. Under the Instructional Materials Umbrella
Individual units, lessons, and plans
Supplemental resources – formally adopted or not
K-12 core curricula
District-created materials/resources
Online courses
Teacher-created materials
Maple by kanegen – CC BY

8. Why OER…
8It Looks Insoluble by David Goehring– CC BY

9. Rhino by kenteegardin– CC BY SA
Putting the pieces together
OER review process
OER District Summits
OER User Group grants
Awareness and outreach

10. http://digitallearning.k12.wa.us/oer/library/
Washington OER Project
OER Review Results
Reviewed OER Library
• 24 full-course mathematics curricula
• 60 English Language Arts units
• Review instruments and process

11. Think about OER as an important part in your district’s instructional
material strategy.
Engage with stakeholders outside your area of expertise to look at OER
through different lenses.
Provide a forum for cross-district discussion of OER implementation.
OER Summits
Mt. Rainier by Wsigemund Service CC BY SA

12. OER User Groups
Together by JD Hancock CC BY
Organized around a problem
of practice
Share ideas
Define best practices
Champion effective
distribution and
implementation of resources

13. Effective implementation efforts are complicated, costly and difficult for many
districts to accomplish individually.
Online hub for the statewide user group, including shared content, resource
materials, and teacher discussion forums.
Questions that will be addressed in this effort include:
• defining best models for collaboration
• adapting, modifying, and sharing content
• supporting successful classroom implementations
How do you effectively share course
implementation resources across a wide number
of districts?
OER User Groups
EngageNY Mathematics

14. EngageNY Mathematics User Group
OER User Groups
EngageNY Mathematics

15. Of Washington State’s 296 school districts, two-thirds have 2,000 or fewer
students.
Provide the opportunity for ELA teachers from four geographically close districts
to come together one day per month to review, evaluate, plan, teach and reflect
on curriculum available to them as open educational resources.
They will create a shared pool of high quality open educational resources to be
used for classroom instruction and be shared online for the benefit of the
greater educational community.
How do small schools with teachers working in
isolation collaborate and share resources?
OER User Groups
OER Small Schools Consortium

16. Since there was not a set of published curricula that met their students’
needs, Grandview wrote draft units for grades 6 – 11.
While this work began with the purpose of creating core instructional material
for Grandview teachers, the goal now is:
• To complete the units with adherence to licensing permissions
• Provide proper attribution
• Openly license the derivative work and disseminate via OER repositories
• Promote equity of access to standards based work for all students
How do you retrofit a district designed curriculum to be
ready for legal wide scale sharing?
OER User Groups
Grandview Core Literacy 6–12
Education Weekly: District Makes Far Reaching Change to Open Resources

17. http://www.wscss.org/lesson-plans
How do you help educators develop and
review resources in a shared repository?
OER User Groups
Social Studies Rubric Development Team
Social Studies does not have a good
instrument for alignment to the WA
recommended framework.
Pull together educators from across the
state to leverage existing rubric
adaptations from other states as a
springboard to creation of our own.
Tool for vetting open resources
uploaded to Washington State Council
for the Social Studies repository a

18. Idealism detached from action is just a dream.
But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling
up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit,
is very exciting. It's very real. It's very strong.
Bono

19. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
@waOSPI_OER
barbara.soots@k12.wa.us
http://digitallearning.k12.wa.us/oer
Keep in Touch with the WA OER Project
http://www.k12.wa.us/