Open Educational Resources Discussion Begins Today!

Dear Colleagues,

The Science, Math, and Evidence-based Professional Development groups are excited to host the Open Educational Resources: Working Together to Evaluate and Promote High Quality Resources in the Classroom discussion this week! Special guests Dahlia Shaewitz, Dr. Tara Myers, and Amanda Duffy from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) will lead a lively discussion now through Friday exploring the values and challenges of using open educational resources (OER).

Visit OER Commons at www.oercommons.org to explore some of the valuable STEM resources available. Looking forward to a robust discussion around the use of these instructional materials.

Please welcome Dahlia, Tara, and Amanda!

Thanks,

Jackie Taylor

Moderator, Science and EBPD Groups

Comments

Hello LINCS Community Members and thank you, Jackie, for this intro.  We, too, are looking forward to hearing from community members about their thoughts on evaluating OER.  To begin the discussion, please respond to the prompt below. Our team will be checking in regularly to respond to comments and questions. 

Teachers are very busy.  Is evaluating OER a task that could ultimately save teachers time or is it an invaluable exercise?  Why?

I found finding and evaluating resources for OER commons to be beneficial.  Not only did I find new resources for use in my classroom, I took the time to become familiar with the resource, use it in my classroom and rate it.  This readied me for further use of the particular resource.  Being able to tag the resource for Adult Education meant that colleagues would be able to search for it with greater ease.  I look forward to other educators using resources, either already on OER commons or ones that they newly submit, and making their comments and ratings. Upfront work is work that enables any teacher to save time later.

Hi Elizabeth!

Thank you for sharing your experiences.  I really appreciated your comment "upfront work is work that enables any teacher to save time later".  It nicely articulates one of the values that I see in evaluating OER - by completing the evaluation, you are supporting teachers that you may or may not know, and giving them a little bit of the most precious resource, time!  You also mentioned that using the evaluation tool provided the opportunity for you to become more familiar with the resource.  I see this as supporting reflective practice and an aid helping teachers select the most appropriate resources for teaching and learning.  

What experiences have others have?  If you've evaluated an OER on OER Commons, please share the link here for others to explore.  

If you haven't evaluated an OER on OER Commons, what interests you the most about trying it?  What are you most skeptical about?  All comments are welcome!

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Amanda

I found that using the evaluation tool helped me to make sure the resource (and my lesson) connected to one or more standards. As well, it helped me make sure the OER was quality and/or adaptable for the use I had in mind.

Hello Amanda and others,

Last year, a volunteer sub-group of the LINCS Science CoP used the OER Commons Achieve evaluation rubrics, and we also developed some additional criteria to put together an evaluation tool for reviewing free, online science instruction videos. The group put together an extensive list of these videos that we felt were suitable for adult learners, organizing them by science topic. Then we chose a small number of videos to evaluate. Each science instructional video had a minimum of two evaluators; where these reviewers differed greatly, a third evaluator was added. The write up of the reviews also reflected the range of reviewer opinions. (Those who would like to see the list of videos, the evaluation form and/or the reviews write-up, should e-mail me.)

Learning for Life: The Opportunity for Technology to Transform Adult Education, http://tytonpartners.com/tyton-wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Learning-for-Life_The-Oppty-for-Tech-to-Transform-Adult-Education_March-20151.pdf  is a recent national study on the use of technology in adult basic education conducted by Tyton Partners. They found that "More than 85% of responding administrators and instructors reported using free online technology resources, such as Khan Academy, Facebook, and Google Docs, and they place a high degree of importance on the role of these offerings in supporting instruction." One survey respondent commented "Free online resources get us the best bang for our few bucks and help the most learners. Due to limited funding for resources, adult education programs need to look into OER [open educational resources]." ( Pages 15-16)

So, OERs and other free online resources have found their way into adult ed. The challenge is that teachers working on their own don't have much time to do a formal review of many instructional resources. However, groups of adult education teachers (from large programs, in regions of a state, or in a state) could be organized to do this review work together for everyone's benefit and might, as in the case of the science teachers I have been working with, volunteer a limited amount of time: for their own professional development purposes, to identify promising instructional materials for use with their students, to benefit other adult education teachers and, by working with like-minded colleagues to share the work,to save time.

I assume you will be describing the national OER science resources project that you and your colleagues have organized, Amanda, and I look forward to learning more about it.  I also wonder if any large adult basic skills programs, states, or regions of the country have been organizing their own projects to review OERs.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

Hi David,

Here is some background information about our project:  The Open Educational Resources to Increase Teaching and Learning of STEM Subjects in Adult Education Project, or simply the OER STEM Project, aims to strengthen science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) instructional content and practice in adult education specifically through the use of widely available and free open educational resources (OER).  Over the course of the 3 year project, we have worked with 48 User Group members (math and science adult ed teachers) who found, used and evaluated OER with adult learners in a math or science instructional setting.  All of these evaluations can be found on OER Commons in our public group, Adult Education Open Community of Resources.  Based on what we learned from the User Group, the team created 4 online professional development courses and we just wrapped up a four month Pilot Training of Trainers with 20 adult educators and professional developers for these courses and the supporting training materials.  For more information about the project, visit our project page on LINCS or read the project fact sheet.    

It’s great that you shared your experiences with using the Achieve Rubrics.  You mentioned that you added some additional criteria to evaluate the science videos – can you share what those criteria were and why you decided to add them?  I did a search on OER Commons and I could not find your videos with the completed evaluations.  Did the group make a collective decision not to share them?  If so, can you talk a bit about why that decision was made? 

The Achieve rubrics can be used to evaluate any type of resources.  You made the differentiation in your post between free resources and open resources, which is great.  While your project focused on evaluating free video resources, we focused on open resources of any type, which by definition have certain freedoms, or legal permissions, of use.  This differentiation is the basis for the PD courses developed for the project. 

You mention the challenge of teachers working on their own who don't have much time to do a formal review of many instructional resources.  This is a very valid point.  For those teachers who have evaluated OER with the Achieve Rubrics, can you share the amount of time, on average, it takes to complete an evaluation?  Do the benefits out-weigh the time requirements?

I, too, wonder if any adult basic skills programs, states, or regions of the country have been organizing their own projects to review OER. Please speak up if you are involved in anything like this.  We can learn a lot from you!

As a reminder, we will be facilitating a webinar on May 28, 2015 from 1:30-3:00pm EST on the value of evaluating OER and the Achieve Rubrics.

Thanks for sharing!

Amanda

Thanks Amanda. 

You wrote: 

You mentioned that you added some additional criteria to evaluate the science videos – can you share what those criteria were and why you decided to add them? 

The science video reviews will be found at: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6715575/Science%20Video%20Reviews%208.17.14.docx

In addition to the eight Achieve rubrics we added these criteria that we felt would be needed by adult basic skills teachers of science who wanted to decide whether not to preview these videos:

1. Web address of the video

2. Length of the video (in minutes)

3. Level: (ABE, ASE or Transition)

4. Overall Suitability for Adult Basic Skills Learners

5. Description

6. Accuracy and Quality of Content  (Rating of 1, 2, or 3)

7. Degree of engagement (Rating of 0, 1, 2, or 3)

8. Presence/absence of an assessment

9. Presence/absence of  a lesson or practice exercises

We did not make a decision not to include them in OER Commons; from the beginning it was our intention to upload them there, but this just hasn't happened yet. Perhaps it will now. : - ) Recall, please that this was an entirely volunteer project for all of us.

You wrote:

For those teachers who have evaluated OER with the Achieve Rubrics, can you share the amount of time, on average, it takes to complete an evaluation?  Do the benefits out-weigh the time requirements?

I don't know, so I just posted the question to our group and asked them to join this discussion and answer it themselves, or to email me. If I hear, I'll let you know. 

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

Hi Amanda,

You asked, "For those teachers who have evaluated OER with the Achieve Rubrics, can you share the amount of time, on average, it takes to complete an evaluation?  Do the benefits out-weigh the time requirements?"

One of the teachers in the project responded: "The evaluation time varies based on the time of the video. If you subtract the time spent watching the video, then the evaluation is about 15 minutes. The evaluation isn't really time consuming except for watching time. I do think the process is worthwhile. I have used the list to pull out videos for my class usually as a supplement to our text instruction."

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

 

Let me start by saying that I love the idea of educational professionals sharing work and discussing that work and I think we need to do everything we can to increase those collaborations in person and online. These discussions may be one of the few tools that help out part time staff get any training or exposure to some very critical resources and practices that increase learner successes.

When we talk about evaluating anything, the measure that is used in the evaluation is very important. Additionally, there is the challenge that all teachers and learners are individuals and will have individual needs and perceptions of values. These two points, standardized tools for assessment and allowing for a huge diversity of individual needs are a vital part of this discussion.

David mentions in another response that some teams are getting together to start to evaluate OER resources (he mentioned science but I am sure there are others tackling other topics as well). I was curious about what standard evaluation tools might be used out there. Doing a quick search for "OER Rubrics" brought me to http://www.achieve.org/oer-rubrics which has some very nice descriptors that help individuals try to evaluate resources. Each of those criteria can be argued are very important to know about any resource, but I question what those in the field really want to know about when looking for a resource. So many teachers are crunched for time. If our evaluation tools and metrics have too many components, there is less likelihood the teacher will engage I think.

If large teams of evaluators are hired with the goal of vetting resources out there 24/7 as they are submitted, then I think having 7 rubrics like those listed in the link above is worth doing because those 7 items really do give a wealth of information about any lesson. I personally believe that with so many repositories being worked on by so many people all over the country, it is impractical to expect that any one group or agency will have the people and money available to be constantly evaluating everything that is being put out in the public domain. The evaluation group probably could sift through a respectable number of lessons and get those stashed away, but as soon as that group’s funding stops, that subset of reviewed collections is endangered from either becoming lost among the growing number of other collections or it if is opened to the public for the work to continue, the quality of those public assessments may dilute the quality of the collection.  I propose that we need a simplified evaluation tool and process that allows teachers in the field, the opportunity to quickly and easily evaluate tools they actually have used. Perhaps that list of 7 rubrics comes down to the 3 that are most relevant to most people and that becomes the metric. I understand that having the public at large evaluate these resources will most likely include many ignorant and skewed evaluations, but we can look to Wikipedia, Amazon.com’s reviews and many other public evaluation systems that turn out very useful materials that the public currently uses. Every few months another collection is showing up online. I don’t think this expansion of resources being independently published will slow down. Having a simple, easy to access public evaluation tool/system in which all the results can easily be consumed is very important. Other than that, we might need a constant stream of money and a dedicated full time staff to review and categorize all the information being added to collections out there daily. How do others feel about a controlled group of evaluators (limited by funding longevity) vs a wide open evaluation model that is less robust and will probably have much more variance in value of responses?

    Great thinking!

I agree that the evaluation is time-consuming, but often several of the 7 parts are "N/A."   Most resources are either aimed at students *or* teachers, so only one of those needs to be included. In addition, comments aren't necessary.   However, it might be worth putting in some radio buttons or lists to check off for common issues. 

    When I mentioned OERcommons to our staff they were very interested in being able to find resources that had been evaluated beyond "0 to 5 stars."   

    Perhaps there could be two evaluation options.  

   It occurs to me as I type that we could take a clue from Amazon, perhaps, which has incentives for writing good reviews and those little "was this review useful to you?" buttons.   I have a friend who gets all kinds of products for free, to review, because she wrote lots of reviews that were well-regarded by the public.   Even if it were just a "badge" of some kind, it would be a serious incentive to me -- and it would be a good way to get data pretty easily from the site, I think. 

      Controlled groups of educators would also be a good idea.   In my mad perusals and porings over What PEople Have Said ONline about OER, I found several references to the sustainability issues of OER, since so often somebody gets a grant, does a project, and then it ends and it's one of those sad, old, unmaintained websites.  However, I know that here at Parkland College it seems they're trying to work the creation of online materials into the routines of curriculum design and production, and I suspect that there's room for OER (a fellow who designed a natural selection activity said "I'll talk to *anybody* about natural selection!" when I asked how he felt about making it open...)

Hi Edward,

Thank you for your thought provoking post about evaluating OER.  You've provided some great insights to spark a rich discussion and I hope others will respond.  

First, you mention the idea of payment for evaluations.  While this may be a great hook and initial method to get teachers involved in OER use and evaluation, it's not sustainable for a couple of reasons.  The first is the most obvious, and that is funding.  The second is the the vast amount of materials that are shared each day in the open community.  It would be impossible to evaluate them all.  I also wonder, in this scenario, if it gets at what teachers need?  When teachers evaluate their own resources or resources they intend to use, they have an added opportunity for reflection on the resources itself and its value within the particular classroom, helps the teacher reflect on their practice and use of resources and possibly the time to align a resource to standards, as Kaye mentioned.  Others' evaluations can certainly help a potential user decide which resource to choose and which one needs to modified, though. Asking teachers to evaluate their own resources helps build the open movement from the ground up.  Imagine if each teacher in adult education evaluated one OER per week! 

Now, the rubrics.  Yes, it's true that the Achieve Rubrics have 7 distinct rubrics.  Since OER come in a variety of forms from videos, to games, to lesson plans to full curriculum, not all rubrics will be applicable all the time.  For example, if a resource is geared toward teachers, has suggested activities for deeper learning and an assessment, then only 3 of the rubrics would apply.  We'll talk about that in more detail during our May 28th webinar, but it's worthy of mention here.  You're right that completing the rubrics will take some time, which is a valuable (most valuable?) resource.  The time needed for evaluation will decrease over time as the descriptors become more familiar and teachers are better versed in the process.  I'm confident that teachers are already completing an evaluation like the Achieve Rubrics for potential or used resources, just not in the open community, yet. Why not in a public space where others can gain some insight?  You mention a simplified evaluation tool.  Have you found or used another?  If not, what criteria do you suggest all teachers use and why?  

Thank you, again, Edward for this thoughtful post.  I'll excited to keep the conversation going and hearing from others.

Amanda

Amanda, I am seeing that in many online repositories being created, there is a divide among review strategies. Some are going with a paid core group of reviewers others are going to the open community evaluations. I agree with you that any paid core group will be difficult to sustain and may even offer too filtered a set of opinions.

Opening up to community evaluations has to have some additional pieces that you suggest. There has to be some way of the community moving effective pieces up a list and moving items that need more revision down the list. Of course to keep it collaborative, written suggestions should be included as well as any star or number system. I just spent a good chunk of time looking over some of the Math OER items. In my current work, my concentration is heavily upon the CCS and CCRS (College and Career Readiness Standards which is a subset of the CCS for adult ed). It was particularly interesting to look at some OER items that were rated a perfect score in "Alignment to standards". In the items I looked at, there were often a list of a number of standards a resource included, but there was no indication throughout the activity or resource as to what parts of the activity really were applying to which standards. Worse, there were no formal assessments of any kind offered for teachers to assess any listed standard in relationship to the very nice activities that were presented. With actual school funding becoming ever more tied into demonstrating standards based instruction and assessment, I see some room for improvement specific to how we look at "Alignment to standards". 

You asked about a simplified tool or means of assessment. I was fortunate to be able to participate in OCTAE's CCRS Phase 1 and Phase 2 trainings. These trainings helped state teams explore what the major shifts are in the CCS (and CCRS) and in Phase 2 there were many tools offered as possible resource evaluation tools. The metrics used are of course centered on the amount of alignment to a standard or set of standards and I have been looking at those suggestions in comparison to the other metrics out there like the Achieve Rubrics. In any set of evaluations, it seems the variance of interpretations can be quite wide. With that in mind, I keep coming back to how businesses evaluate things. The Amazon model (star system with comments encouraged and even the comments have a "Helpful / Not Helpful" tag) seems to offer the quickest method of offering feedback and responding to the feedback of others. As a shopper, I am always looking to the stars first then I look for the negative comments to see if those concerns are important to the application I was hoping to use the product for. If it is something cosmetic like color or how easy it gets scratched, and all I care about is how well it does it's job, those negative comments almost sell me on trying out the product because I know the produce is not suffering for the use I have in mind. Teachers will likewise be coming at lessons and materials from so many angles with so many purposes and I think our current strategies of assessing materials may offer a restrictive set of boundaries that are not clear to all (see the align to standards in previous paragraph). I am not convinced of any one right answer right now, but in thinking about how valuable time is to those in the field, evaluation has to be quick and easy on the input end and clearly descriptive in highlighting what the product does and does not do on the consumer end. If I had to look at the Achieve Rubrics alone and trim those down, I would propose that if these three items were clearly understood and defined, the majority of the field would be able to determine quickly if they wished to try that activity or resource:

  • Rubric I. Degree of Alignment to Standards - necessary with the many standards based funding formulas that will be coming down the pike in many states. Should assess every standard listed in how effective the activities support each standard.
  • Rubric VI. Quality of Instructional Tasks and Practice Exercises - basically subjective feelings of "were these activities perceived to be good experiences for students to engage in"
  • Rubric IV. Quality of Assessment - This should be more of "Does the assessment provided directly correlate to EACH individual standard indicated" Way too many lessons out there promising 5-6 standards and offering no assessments or maybe one umbrella assessment. 

Most metrics I see out there are heavily centered on Rubric VI above. Teachers find it easy to get a gut feel for how their students engaged, what levels of motivation were present and maybe even some ideas of what students actually learned in the process could be gleaned. Teachers are the professionals here so lets keep that. Throwing in the other two items really gives us the intent (what standards) and the measure (how will I see they met those standards) that most of the teachers in this country will find to be vital information as funding formulas start to shift. 

You mentioned the dream of each adult educator entering in one OER resource a week. I love the idea and I know you smile as you typed that. There are those puppy idealists out there that love to share all the goodies they find with others. If we make a system that is quick, easy and effective, I think we are going to get a good amount of OER items shared in a short time. The challenge is that the system does not meet the teacher's needs of being quick, easy or effective to their classroom needs yet. There are some great things out there, but it takes tons of time and sifting to find that one gem a teacher wanted last week to put in her lessons. 

Please realize these are all thoughts and ideas, not solutions. Do others have thoughts of how we create the quickest, easiest and most efficient system? 

Hi Edward:

Thanks for your stimulating postings! I’m just returning to the country and I’ve been reading the various posts this morning about evaluating OER.

It is sounding like time is the biggest challenge for teachers to search for and later to evaluate OER.  I think time will always be a challenge, so making it quick and easy, as you noted, is ideal. Teachers & other users, like learners (thanks Brooke!), will need time to become familiar with the rubrics (whether Achieve or other)…and with some experience, can more easily evaluate OER. It seems that this practice needs to become part of the teacher/learner repertoire – i.e., good practice means evaluating tools after use.

Another point you teased out is the difference between experienced evaluators, e.g., the LINCS Resource Collection uses experienced “approved” evaluators, and other evaluators such as teachers. I think of your Amazon example, which is spot on—I do the same thing when looking at comments. Same with TripAdvisor—I look at the ratings overall then decide whether to dig further and how to evaluate the evaluation comments!  So, this takes time and I only use these reviews when I need to make a decision about whether or not to use a tool (or buy a book, or reserve a hotel).

My ideal scenario would be to have OER reviewed by experienced/expert types—then still have the opportunity to comment on how it worked in my classroom or with my learners. Both types of information are valuable.  And as you and Amanda noted, that’s not likely given the vast number of OER. What’s a OER aficionado to to??  For now, I’m looking for numbers—the greater the number of people who have evaluated and commented on a resource, the more data I have to work with. That means I have to go in and evaluate as well, to contribute my thinking.

Now, we’re back full circle to time—or motivation. What motivates a teacher to evaluate the OER they use? I’d suggest making the evaluation part of the routine, making it a habit, and this both drives up the number of evaluations and also the number of visits to a site.

I think that OER Commons or any other similar site can become that go-to-site, much like Amazon, Trip Advisor, or other familiar sites become the go-to place for information.  I’m not “selling” one particular website, though we have found OER Commons makes evaluating convenient. Whatever the next generation of OER repository looks like, it will need to include that evaluation process that we are talking about here.

Thanks for such great comments!

By signing up to do the evaluations and committing to it, I found the time to evaluate the OER.   There was a bit of a learning curve but because we were in a group and sharing and talking about it, I was a lot less likely to simply put it aside.   

    I think that doing things as a community is critical for getting significant things done.   I can stand up (as I'm going to do) in front of people and show them the amazing resources and implore them to use them, evaluate them, create them (or revise and make them their own), and make things accessible -- but if people are islands, I don't think it's likely to happen. Most of these folks probably won't be "adult educators" for the basics (this is the state of Illinois' "Faculty SUmmer Institute" of college folks interested in technology).   Are there resources at oercommons for more advanced postsecondary content?   I'll be providing a list of other OER hubs and possibilities for community like http://wikieducator.org/Main_Page   (as well as LINCS of course!).    

    I wonder if anybody's researched the effect of getting emails on persistence.   I know Codecademy has automatic emails that congratulate you on milestones and consecutive days... but if you fade away, you know it's just an automatic email, not a human ;)   

    Now to go work on that resource catalogue... I'll be posting everything online of course, with a CC license :) 

I meant to include that the really active group in the OER-STEM and the quick responses to questions and speculations were a huge plus.   The AIR team knows how to make this kind of project work :) 

Good morning, Sue and other community members!

You raise a great point about commitment  As part of a community, there is a certain level of accountability and motivation.  We definitely saw that with our pilot trainers and user group members.  The sharing helped to motivate people, and common questions and concerns sparked not only great discussions, but also deeper learning.  How can we keep this going?  What do teachers need in order to participate in the OER evaluation process?

I can't point to specific research about the effect of getting emails on persistence.  OER Commons does use a badge system to 'reward' users who evaluate OER, submit OER from other sources, and for creating OER and sharing them with open licenses.  

To answer your question about postsecondary resources:  There are a bulk of OER geared toward the postsecondary learner.  To find these on OER Commons click "browse all" from the home page and then select 'postsecondary'.  You'll see almost 50,000 resources - of course, you can narrow your search based on your needs.  There are many other institutions that support and share OER for this population as well. Keep in mind that one of the values of OER is the 5R framework - the legal right to reuse, redistribute, revise, remix and retain.  Because of these, the content can be modified to meet the specific needs of learners. Here are just a few links for you to explore: 

  • http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/
  • http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
  • http://oyc.yale.edu/
  • http://distancelearn.about.com/od/isitforyou/p/UCBerkeleyOpen.htm 

 

What kept me motivated to continue was the benefit to my learners!  They loved the original lessons that I was finding.  They loved creating their own OER, too.  Learners became engaged and took great responsibility in creating lessons for each other and they did a great job!  I think the key is to start small - each session try to incorporate at least one new OER lesson.  Then over time, you will have an entire sessions worth of curriculum!  That's what we are doing and the best part, each instructor then shares with each other.  So we are building lessons that can be revised, remixed, reused, redistributed, and retained - the definition of OER!

Brooke

Hi Brooke,

Thanks for sharing your experience with OER and for reminding us of the true value of using and evaluating these materials - student benefits.  You mention in your post that your students create their own OER.  Can you share a specific example with the community?  Do they also evaluate the OER?  If so, do they use the Achieve Rubrics or do you have a different evaluation tool? 

Amanda

In every level of education, administrators need to assemble professional development plans and goals for each year. In talking with many of them, honestly, behind closed doors, and with no microphones on... many shared that they struggle to do this planning. They grab "whatever is hot" or "whatever others suggest to them" and many share that there is often much disconnect from PD session topic to PD session topic. With these PD sessions coming months apart, it is easy for many to feel there are just more hoops to jump through without anything real to connect to individual classroom experiences. 

I would suggest that if we package an OER Review and an OER Creation set of packets to offer administrators, it would be easy to get many of them to incorporate an hour of full staff PD towards the review and creation of resources that directly are applicable to all the other movement and curriculum and hip buzzwords of the day. To fit in one hour of this kind of work in a 6 hour pd day, offers planners a consistent "break" from whatever random programming is going on to a something that can become part of every PD session. Even if the staff worked in pairs to contribute and these mini sessions happened 2-3 times a year in 20% of the schools out there, we would have tons of OER input from the field that would be sustained. Again, we have to keep it short in time so it can easily be sprinkled in and we need to provide a packet to help guild or direct the work so the administrator, or someone they assign, can run these sessions with much success and excitement. Without well designed packages, the work will quickly become a chore and drudgery. With the push for standards in many states, think of how easy it would be for someone to pull 3 ELA standards and 3 Math standards and offer to the staff, "These are the standards we are concentrating on in this month. You have an hour to work with your teams on one of these standards to find and review (see this packet) or create/submit something we already use (see that packet)." Every PD can include different standards to focus on. Teachers will not see this as busy work because they are all going to be held to some level of accountability to standards depending on their state. 

Let's develop those support packages and then offer some webinars that sell to administrators the idea of teaching teachers how to share and evaluate each other's work through OER can improve learning opportunities for all students. 

I know that we had a pretty good turnout during our professional development week at a session called "Try this one easy trick to improve your course!"   where our distance learning and TV/Radio station people demonstrated what they've done working with teachers and tech to make things.   We weren't looking at standards, but that's not hard to infuse. 

    I'm trying to think of ways to get people at my 50-minute session thinking about integrating OER into their courses, with links to a WIPPEA outline and probably a couple of others so they coudl do that on their own time. 

    However, I want to also think about "what is my learning objective, what role does the OER play in helping reach that objective, and what are the other parts of the lesson I need to reach that objective?"   

   I'm trying to generate a list of Things OER Can Do.    I've thought of:

        providing an introduction/explanation of a concept or topic

        Providing a multimedia interactive experience 

        assessing learning

       providing practice for a skill

       providing a more basic or more advanced perspective on a topic or concept

      Providing background information (such as a tutorial for a prerequisite skill that some students might already have)

      Providing a menu of choices so students can pursue a specific topic more deeply

      providing a whole course :)  

.... am I missing anything obvious?   

Yesterday I was responding to an email discussion with David R. The discussion got me thinking all day about the challenges we are experiencing with OER evaluation and contribution, College and Career Readiness Standards adoption and contribution, and digital portfolio adoption and effective usage. In all three of these fields, there are many teachers out there that buy in and want to participate and yet there are still barriers. After some thought, it came to me that there is still one elephant in the room we may not be focusing on that could open the floodgates on all three projects I listed. 

For decades, individual teacher efforts to create creative learning experiences have been increasingly marginalized as the field increases it's dependency on textbook curriculum. These textbook curriculum are often an exercise in procedural mathematical trivial pursuit mixed in with some behavioral compliance.  There are no meaningful products from a student perspective. For a student, most classrooms are almost exclusively teacher-centric. "What do you want me to do today?" is the mantra when students come into classrooms almost every day. It has been about compliance to the teacher's direction for some time now. Our efforts in adult ed to center in on the individual are well placed and powerful. Our intake methods are shifting to get much more valuable information about our individuals. We explore career and college options early on in a learner's experience so we might offer more contextualized experiences. We aim more at individuals in the hopes of helping each person find success in standards they individually lack. Think about how much of a major shift this is for a teaching profession that moved away from all of this almost 3 generations ago. 

I would propose that a major challenge to the digital portfolio, OER resources, and CCRS efforts today center squarely on the fact that most teachers still need much professional development and mentoring to be able to practically apply their creative ideas and ween themselves from the very comfortable patterns established of increased textbook curriculum dependency. As teachers, and their programs, begin experiencing success with these efforts, it is very easy to find individuals (usually your early adopters) chomping at the bit to share their creative offerings, opinions and best of all the successes the learners experience. I have mentored with hundreds of educators at all levels k-college in the last 20 years and in every case, it has been so pleasurable to watch these hard working teachers transform from drones simply marching to a beat to professional educators artistically creating and applying ideas (teacher's and student's) to help all individuals find success at the various levels.

With many adult educators in Maine being very part time (less than 10 hours a week), getting professional development of any kind to teachers is a huge challenge. I propose that the more we can improve on this challenge and offer consistent training and mentoring options (face to face or digital) the more we will see quality involvement in the many positive efforts that are out there. Think about why we want a central review team to hit up submissions that come in. There is an inherent distrust that the general teacher population can accurately assess any given work. Isn't that alarming? We are talking about a profession that fears the incompetence of it's own profession. Fortunately, we have extremely talented people that can help bring the rest of the field back into student-centric, creative, product based, and contextualized lesson design and practice. We just need the vehicle to provide consistent support to a very part time staff that makes up the majority of most adult education programs. Perhaps technology can help a great deal. How about grouping teachers with others to do lesson swaps (one person designs a lesson, tries it themselves and records data then ships the lesson to another to do the same and both teachers discuss results and revisions) can connect teachers with positive coaches in an easy way?

How do you feel? Do you feel that really pushing teacher PD and mentoring to create a professional norm of creative lesson/activity design that produces measurable products from learners would "fix" many of the challenges we face in the many LINCS discussion threads? I am sure we can find areas to improve and tweak things with each movement (Portfolio, CCRS, OER...) that will find some success, but don't you think that all those efforts may fall flat unless the teaching majority is ready to step away from compliance based curriculum to move to more student-centric experiences? Sometimes we concentrate so much on specifics we forget to step back far enough to see some of the sources of the challenges. What do you see?

A quick comment before I dash off to the conference (and I'll be talking OER again tomorrow -- same talk, because it was deemed such a hot topic that I was asked to do it twice).... yesterday's keynote speaker was from University of Maryland, University College which is an open access institution that went "no cost" for their textbooks, etc. this year.   

    She said that they are moving *away* from textbooks and are looking for OER for one thing at a time.   (Yes, I'll be finding her email and sending her our list of Math and Science resources!)   

    (My presentation had some tech issues b/c I made the rookie mistake of not finding a way to get in the room early and check things out ... but since it's a BYOD conference, the participants -- and the room was full, so 50+ people -- *could* get to the links I provided.   PhET was really popular...) 

Congrats! And good luck on the next one. There are a few community college systems around the country that are moving or have moved entirely to open textbooks, and they have ROI to prove its value. They also have student stories--those students who could not afford college because the textbooks were costing them several thousand dollars a year.  I will look for my notes from the Open Ed conference last fall & see if I can find them to share with you, Sue. I encourage folks to check out the Open Ed conference scheduled for this fall in Vancouver--a hot topic and a cool conference: http://openedconference.org/

Ed and all, I think we all can agree that supporting the mostly part time teaching staff, which is also --by the way-- constantly turning over, is a very real challenge to professional development in our field. It has become particularly challenging at this juncture with so many changes coming at us so fast and furiously. I think there is great potential in mentoring and peer coaching. Your idea to do "lesson swaps" has a lot of merit. This is very similar to a process referred to as "Lesson Study" where teachers work together to develop a lesson and then evaluate the lesson and revise it collaboratively. Lesson Study has been practiced in K12 for many years, but I have not heard of this being done in adult literacy.  Personally, I would love to be part of a Lesson Study team.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, AELL, Assessment and CCRS CoPs

Sure I can give an example, Amanda.  Most recently, we did watch a video on a experiment using microwaves and ivory soap.  This resource was an OER, from this resource we began hypothesizing about other brands of soap.  We completed the assignment with the current OER so they could learn about what was happening with the microwave to have that effect on the soap.  Once, the completed the activity - we extended it to their homes.  They students formed groups of two and pick a different type of soap and created a lesson similar to the one we completed with questions about the experiment.  They made conjectures if the type/brand of soap mattered and if so, what their thoughts would what changes would be seen.  They then used their cell phones to video themselves (just like it was modeled in our OER) and then they answered their questions.  They uploaded these videos to our Learning Management System for our class so learners in the course could look at them.  They were engaged and learned a lot about science doing this project.

I don't currently have them evaluate other OERs with a rubric but I do like the idea and I can see the value in having involved in the process.  I haven't uploaded them to OER Commons but that might be the next step and then have them evaluate the OER. (hmmmmm, ideas are springing up).

The students liked watching the other videos and asked each group questions - it was probably the most interactive and engaged the class had been in a while and the best part - they were LEARNING!

I want to encourage other instructors to consider doing things like this because the learners really liked becoming the "mad scientist" and designing the lesson.

Brooke

I just uploaded my powerpoint (but I can make revisions and I'm sure I will!)  and list of links for my presentation.   I also saved them to my Google Drive and if anybody wants a peek they're here 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B11LhZpTaZQJUUh5MWhGUTM3UVk/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B11LhZpTaZQJTWlSenpUR25mLVE/view?usp=sharing

  Now, I'm going to try to look things over and find a way to make a "handout" that will make sense on its own, after the conference :) And I still have to figure out exactly how I'm going to get people back and forth to things online.   This shoudln't be a "sit and listen to Sue" presentation; I want people checking things out as we go... 

 

  I've found a lot of Creative Commons licensed slide shows at slideshare.net .   An awful lot of people doing presentations at postsecondary level are talking about open textbooks and giving lots of stats to justify why we should be using them.   I'll be curious about whether people expect me to talk about them at my presentation.   

     

You'll be able to see it online in a week or so ... but I uploaded my slide show to http://www.slideshare.net/siouxgeonz/oer-fsi-2015-jones-to-upload2    -- I had some tech issues but a friend of David Wiley who's a keynote speaker jumped up and talked while we worked things out (or not -- but it gave me time to figure out that I Didn't Need No INternet)  ... so when *his* tech failed at his turn, I could stand up and say that that had happened and thank him and give him a minute... 

 

Hi everyone! 

The May 28th webinar, Open Educational Resources: Working Together to Evaluate and Promote High Quality Resources in the Classroom, delivered by Dahlia Shaewitz, Dr. Tara Myers, and Amanda Duffy from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is now accessible on the LINCS YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILsDKeL8YYA&feature=youtu.be

Thank you!

I have had the pleasure of working with hundreds of teachers that were all wonderful educators and yet the concept of what a rubric is and how it can/should be used has been extremely varied. I just read a very short article suggesting 5 things to keep in mind with rubrics that I think may be very useful for teachers in the field to review and keep in mind. So often the pressures of grades and the whole grading process pollute the assessment possibilities that actually can foster learning. Rubrics done well hit all 5 of the points presented in this article: http://www.brilliant-insane.com/2015/01/thats-not-rubric-youre-using-wrong-5-ways-clean-mess.html 

Are others finding a number of "rubrics" that are quite far off the intent of the rubric as a formative assessment that can be used for learning, reflection, goal setting, and as a way of demonstrating progress?