As many of you know, I’ve spent much of this year working on a project to explore the adoption and implementation of K-12 core instructional materials and to explore business models for the successful and sustainable publishing of such open educational resource (OER) materials.

I’ve written about some of this work as it’s progressed, and now the final report on this is available.

The report covers state and district adoption processes for K-12 core curriculum, considerations that are important to districts doing adoptions (particularly as it relates to OER publishers), attitudes toward OER, publishers’ perspectives on product and OER, information on business models for OER publishers, and recommendations to those in this market.

I learned a lot in the conversations and research that comprised this work. I am grateful to the Hewlett Foundation and everyone who participated.

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Well, this year’s strands and keynoters have been announced, and the Call for Proposals is now up. Proposals are due August 15.

I know that most of you reading this have a lot to contribute to a conference like this, so please consider proposing a session. We’ll all benefit!

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Next week is the Virtual 4T Conference put on by the University of Michigan School of Education. This is a free, virtual conference (but registration is required).

On Monday, May 20 at 7pm Eastern, I’ll be a part of a panel talking about “The Potential of Open Resources for Your Classroom.” Hope you can join this and other V4T sessions and expand your professional learning!

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We can either see this as an opportunity to innovate and improve learning…or we can just go on with business as usual.

I recently gave a short talk about this at SXSWedu. Here it is. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

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The second annual Open Education Week is this week, March 11-15, 2013. Open Education Week is a five-day celebration of the global Open Education Movement, featuring online and local events around the world, video showcases of open education projects, and information. Its purpose is to raise awareness of both the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.

Here is a calendar of all the events, and here are a few to make special note of:

• School of Open at Citizen Science Workshop – live f2f event, March 10 in Los Angeles
• P2PU: A Showcase of Open Learning – free webinar, Wed., March 14 at 3pm Pacific
• School of Open launch – lots of great, free courses, ongoing

This is a great opportunity to learn more about open and also to share this info with others in your organization. Throughout next week, I’ll be posting daily nuggets of open goodness.

And in case you missed it, here is a hangout a group of us did for the #etmooc about open learning. There are some thought-provoking discussions here.

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Next week March 5-10 is the first annual Open Education Week!

Open Education Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are materials, tools, and media used for teaching and learning that are licensed for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute.

The event will take place online and in different locations around the world, with opportunities to participate in webinars, discussions and live events. Participation is free and open to all. Visit www.openeducationweek.org for more information.

How can you participate?

• Participate in a webinar. Here’s a schedule of them. (Times are GMT.) Here are two I’m participating in:
  • OER in K-12 education – Thurs. March 8, 9am central time
  • P2PU – Peer Learning Fueled by Open Content – Thurs. March 8, 2pm central time
• Use some of the great OER for K-12.
• Open license some of your own content.
• Tell someone else about OER. Tweet, post, and spread the word!

Also, if you’ll be at SXSWedu, come to one of my sessions there about OER. I’ll have some great Open Ed week t-shirts to give away there as well

Sharing is good!

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Unfortunately, to date, these have only been available as pdf files. Pdfs are good for printing, but not much good for other uses, like putting on mobile devices, interacting with, making movies, etc.

The great thing about open-licensed content, though, is that you can remix it.

So this summer and fall, I’ve been working on taking these pdf files and remixing them into PowerPoint presentations, separate jpg art files, and interactive VoiceThreads (with audio and the ability for students to record their own audio).

original pdf:

ppt:

voicethread:

All of these resources for almost 80 stories are available  on Curriki, along with ideas for using them.

Thanks to FreeReading, the Hewlett Foundation, and Bon Education for inspiring the idea to do this and to Steve O. and David Wiley and his Educational Productivity Pledge (see P.S.) for the impetus to move ahead with it.

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The P2PU School of Ed pilot opened sign-up today for seven free, online, open-licensed professional development courses for K-12 teachers.

This program is about peer learning, openness, and deeper learning. It’s hands-on learning driven by each educator’s particular needs and classroom situations. It’s about connecting, collaborating, and creating, not just reading or studying.

These courses are all open licensed under a CC BY license, which means anyone can repurpose the content for whatever purpose they like as long as they attribute the source.

Here are the courses now open for sign-up:

• Differentiating Instruction – description, sign-up open until Sept. 19 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Student Engagement – description, sign-up open until Sept. 12 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• OER in the K-12 Classroom – description, sign-up open until Sept. 19 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Teaching in Online and Blended Classrooms – description, sign-up open until Sept. 12 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Multimedia and Graphics to Facilitate Deeper Learning – description, sign-up open until Oct. 3 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Writing & Common Core: Deeper Learning for All – description, sign-up open until Sept. 26 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning – description, sign-up open until Sept 19 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)

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These books include subjects in ELA, math, social studies, and science and are formatted in web, Kindle, and EPUB versions.

We’ll be adding more titles to this collection over time.

Enjoy!

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Sal Kahn has built a tremendous collection of over 1800 open-licensed videos offering instruction in math and science. They cover topics in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics calculus, and more. These videos are licensed under CC BY SA which means you can use them free of charge and even host them on your own web site, as long as you agree to share (use a CC BY SA license) on any derivative products you build.

Up until now, the videos have only been available on YouTube, which has posed problems for educators. Now, however, the Khan videos are available elsewhere! Curriki has them available as both embeddable and downloadable files. They have also created a group to “organize, extended and build a community of practice around this content.” This is a great opportunity to collaboratively remix this content and add to it. (I have some ideas myself to to remix some of this into a series of middle school math courses in Moodle.)

Another site has collected the Khan videos for download onto a USB drive or server.

There are sure to be more creative uses of this great collection of content to come.

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