Too quiet on the email front! Soon our semester will be over, and I've got summer cut out for me: the usual tutoring for the many fewer summer students, *and* collaborating with a math teacher to completely re-design our "Transitions" level math course. This is the course for students who don't make the COMPASS cutoff for pre-Algebra *and* don't do well enough on an arithmetic skills test to make up for it (if you get 6/10 you get pre-Algebra placement anyway).
We're going to start with the "part whole" concept and really work up that idea that with most situations, you're going to be adding or multiplying to get to the whole; if you're given the whole thing and need to find a missing part, you're going to subtract or divide.
And then in the middle of dabbling in that, I found this gem of an opportunity online... it's a long shot, but I'm putting together my assorted stories and statements: http://dschool.stanford.edu/blog/2013/04/19/hey-eduinnovators-apply-for-the-d-fellowships/
Comments
S Jones,
Like you, we did this at our college and FINALLY we are being utilized by the admissions office for learners who aren't college-ready! The Adult Basic Education is even listed on our placement criteria: http://www.cowley.edu/current/placement/tables.html. But, this summer, I am re-vamping our distance education for mathematics using OVAE's College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education that were just released! I am not sure what items I am going to change but I think I will be looking for plenty of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to utilize as we prepare for the move to the GED 2014 test!
Brooke Istas
Hi Brooke:
Congrats on getting the ABE curriculum into the college! I also want to thank you for mentioning open educational resources (OERs). I want to take this opportunity to mention the OER STEM project, funded by OVAE to encourage use of science and math OERs by adult teachers and learners.
Through this project, we have asked a group of science and math teachers (Brooke included) to use OERs and evaluate them, including comments on how they are used/useful in the adult education setting. We have found a great partner in OER Commons (www.oercommons.org), which currently houses over 44,000 OERs and the site is growing.
OER Commons has already added "adult education" as a tag when adding an OER to the site, and eventually they have agreed to add the subcategories of "ABE" and "Adult ESL", which will make it easier to search for tools specific to adult educators and adult learners. Our project participants are using the OER Commons evaluation tool, which is based on the Achieve Rubrics (learn more here: http://www.achieve.org/oer-rubrics). By using, evaluating, and adding OERs, these adult educators are adding a valuable perspective to the resources that are available on the web.
As the project progresses, we look forward to sharing more information about how to find, manage, use, and evaluate OERs for adult educators and adult learners. We greatly appreciate the active participation of the math and science adult educators who are teaching us so much about how OERs can benefiit the classroom. If you have any questions about this OVAE-funded project, please feel free to contact us at oerstem@air.org.
Very best, Dahlia
Dahlia M. Shaewitz
Project Director, STEM Open Educational Resources (OERs) for Adult Education
American Institutes for Research
1000 Thomas Jefferson Street, NW | Washington, DC 20007
Tel: 202-403-6840 | Fax: 202-403-5001 | Email: dshaewitz@air.org