OER for Common Core

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Karl Nelson is the director of the Digital Learning Department for the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). In this Q&A, he talks about how his state is using open educational resources to help support Common Core State Standards. The OSPI's OER Project was launched in 2012, when the Washington state Legislature passed HB 2337. According to Nelson, the legislature saw OER as a chance to both save districts money and improve instructional material quality, so it directed OSPI to identify a library of openly licensed courseware aligned with the state standards. The Legislature also asked OSPI to provide guidance to school districts using OERs. THE Journal: What strategies have you used to support districts' use of OERs? Karl Nelson: We've reviewed existing open educational resources, and posted the results of the review here. We've held a number of events for teachers to help them understand how OER can be used in schools. These events are nicely integrated with our state's overall efforts to implement the Common Core. In other words, we don't see OER as a distinct effort from our work in helping districts identify high-quality instructional materials that are aligned to our state's standards. We've run a small grant program to provide funding to Washington school districts who are either creating OER, adapting existing OER or adopting OER. THE Journal: What Common Core standards and grade levels are covered by the materials you have gathered? Nelson: Our OER project is focused on both math and English language arts, K-12. To date, we've reviewed high school resources in math and ELA. We're currently in the process of reviewing middle school math and ELA resources. The Journal: What types of materials are available? Nelson: We focused on full-course math resources and unit-level ELA resources. For math, we wanted to focus on resources that districts could consider adopting right away, rather than having to piece together a course from lessons and other smaller pieces of content. In ELA, we focused on unit-level resources, as ELA teachers have a history of picking and choosing from a wider variety of materials. In both cases, we felt like there were a number of useful OER repositories that maintained smaller grain-sized materials, and that we could best help Washington teachers by providing reviews of larger grain-sized materials. THE Journal: In what way, if at all, are the resources specific to the state of Washington? Nelson: The resources really aren't specific to Washington. Instead, they're drawn from national nonprofits, other states and a variety of other sources. THE Journal: How do you vet OERs before placing them on your site? Nelson: This is really the key to our work. To conduct the reviews, we've gathered teams of teachers from across the state. …