Much like other fields of practice, education owns its share of acronyms and initialisms. One that is relatively new to the K-12 scene is OER. In the past decade, the OER movement has trickled down from its higher education roots and is now transforming the world of curriculum resources in K-12 instruction. 

This embedded video (2:27 minutes) offers a fun 30,000 foot introduction to OERs – check it out. Then read on to learn what OER can mean for public school districts like HSE!

In a nutshell, an Open Educational Resource is any electronic educational content that has been specifically tagged (public domain or Creative Commons licensing) as free to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. “Content” ranges from individual items (a video, an article, a quiz question) to grouped resources (an interactive textbook, a curated lesson or unit) to entire courses.

In Spring 2017, HSE Schools joined the federal #GoOpen movement as a #GoOpen Launch District. As a Launch District, HSE will be incorporating some openly licensed educational materials over the next several years. In fact, we’ve already begun! Khan Academy, CK-12, and the lessons plans from Try Engineering are all examples of open educational resources.

Next time, HSE21 Shorts will explore the transformation of Astronomy class — from static textbooks and worksheets to open education extraordinaire.