Perhaps I am making a judgment call, but most educators are practical by nature. We want workable solutions for our classroom, but also solutions that help to engage and inspire students. Many of the practical issues that educators are faced with include lack of time and resources for curriculum creation. Many schools provide little time (if any) for colleague collaboration on designing functional curriculum, or sharing materials, and it seems with all the educational cutbacks, there is even less available time for collaboration. In my district, we have witnessed a reduction in our time for collaboration during PLC (professional learning committees) and during exam week. What happens when teachers are faced with such roadblocks? They begin looking for creative and practical solutions.
An educational shift has emerged in the form of open curriculum repositories that are available on the Internet. As Alec Curous (2006) asserts in his PhD dissertation, “Open source culture, nebulous in its boundaries, has begun to slowly penetrate mainstream education.” Educational repositories provide educators with the ability to share, distribute and remix curriculum to suit their curricular needs. The value in uploading and creating educational material is it allows educators more time to spend on teaching, rather than re-inventing new material (or the wheel). That being said, “the real value of OERs will be to shift instructors away from the creation and delivery of content to focusing on how best learning can be developed and facilitated for, in and by our students” (Contact North, 2013).
Over the past week, I spent some time perusing the abundant collections/ repositories of open educational resources available on the web. Specifically, I've been on the hunt for psychology resources, as there is a significant deficit of high school resources in this field—unless I am willing to pay for them. To my surprise, I found an adequate amount of open resources to inspire more than a peek at what they had to offer. I focused on psychology resources from the K-12 educational repository, Curriki. The psychology resources were limited to eight, but one provided quite a few lessons on various psychology related subjects, and another provided scores of excellent podcasts (The Psych Files) on a multitude of topics. I now consider the open source community as a valuable resource to educators, as these freely shared resources from Curriki will save me innumerable hours of searching for videos and lesson plans. Ideally, I would put my own spin on any educational material I source out, and this is part of the advantage of OERs, as they allow teachers to adapt and remix material to fit their pedagogical needs.
According to the website, Curriki’s objective is to “provide free, high-quality curricula and education resources to teachers, students and parents around the world.” As Curriki is an American based repository, its standards are aligned with various states and its content has a distinctively American flavour. Curriki does offer a variety of curriculum options for K-12, from lesson plans to full courses which are vetted by peers, and educators are also able to nominate resources for Curriki Review Team-- experts in the field. Curriki offers other resources, too, including textbooks, media, and opportunities for collaborative groups. Educators are welcome to contribute to Curriki content, and have the option to select a couple of licensing options: including Creative Commons licensing.
Open educational repositories like Curriki, offer practical options for finding material that is current, adaptable and fulfills the requirements of copyright/left licensing. With educational resources in the public domain, educators are able to build on and share materials online—the “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006), comes to fruition, and in turn educators share with students. The open source educational resources “revolves around what is considered good teaching and learning” by allowing educators to “customize learning for the specific needs of the individual learners” (Contact North, 2013). Open source resources signal a move in a positive direction; one that implies a culture of openness, collaboration and generosity, and one that will benefit not only the students in our classroom, but will also contribute to learning of students beyond the school environment.
An educational shift has emerged in the form of open curriculum repositories that are available on the Internet. As Alec Curous (2006) asserts in his PhD dissertation, “Open source culture, nebulous in its boundaries, has begun to slowly penetrate mainstream education.” Educational repositories provide educators with the ability to share, distribute and remix curriculum to suit their curricular needs. The value in uploading and creating educational material is it allows educators more time to spend on teaching, rather than re-inventing new material (or the wheel). That being said, “the real value of OERs will be to shift instructors away from the creation and delivery of content to focusing on how best learning can be developed and facilitated for, in and by our students” (Contact North, 2013).
Over the past week, I spent some time perusing the abundant collections/ repositories of open educational resources available on the web. Specifically, I've been on the hunt for psychology resources, as there is a significant deficit of high school resources in this field—unless I am willing to pay for them. To my surprise, I found an adequate amount of open resources to inspire more than a peek at what they had to offer. I focused on psychology resources from the K-12 educational repository, Curriki. The psychology resources were limited to eight, but one provided quite a few lessons on various psychology related subjects, and another provided scores of excellent podcasts (The Psych Files) on a multitude of topics. I now consider the open source community as a valuable resource to educators, as these freely shared resources from Curriki will save me innumerable hours of searching for videos and lesson plans. Ideally, I would put my own spin on any educational material I source out, and this is part of the advantage of OERs, as they allow teachers to adapt and remix material to fit their pedagogical needs.
According to the website, Curriki’s objective is to “provide free, high-quality curricula and education resources to teachers, students and parents around the world.” As Curriki is an American based repository, its standards are aligned with various states and its content has a distinctively American flavour. Curriki does offer a variety of curriculum options for K-12, from lesson plans to full courses which are vetted by peers, and educators are also able to nominate resources for Curriki Review Team-- experts in the field. Curriki offers other resources, too, including textbooks, media, and opportunities for collaborative groups. Educators are welcome to contribute to Curriki content, and have the option to select a couple of licensing options: including Creative Commons licensing.
Open educational repositories like Curriki, offer practical options for finding material that is current, adaptable and fulfills the requirements of copyright/left licensing. With educational resources in the public domain, educators are able to build on and share materials online—the “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006), comes to fruition, and in turn educators share with students. The open source educational resources “revolves around what is considered good teaching and learning” by allowing educators to “customize learning for the specific needs of the individual learners” (Contact North, 2013). Open source resources signal a move in a positive direction; one that implies a culture of openness, collaboration and generosity, and one that will benefit not only the students in our classroom, but will also contribute to learning of students beyond the school environment.