More about our work

Visit our services page on OER Commons for greater detail!

Platform and Digital Tools

Our custom digital library and software give educators access to the tools and learning materials they need all in one place, help you create growing collaborative communities online, and facilitate the management of open learning  initiatives.

Microsites are a comprehensive solution – customizable content libraries with robust features to support communities of educators across subject areas, schools, or regions. They include a full, independent library with its own domain, a tailored approach to metadata and content creation, as well as analytics dashboards to measure reach and engagement.

Hubs are spaces within our flagship library, OER Commons, where organizations can develop collections, manage content, facilitate conversations, and share information about their work. Hubs offer customizable formatting, community groups, and include content curation support within ISKME’s collection development policy.

Build Your Team’s Skills

Whether you are looking to build competencies in instructional design and curriculum development, or advocacy and initiative building, ISKME draws on decades of experience to build robust engagement and support educators in developing strong skills. We offer a variety of options – from single webinars to intensives or academies – that fit with your budget and needs.

OER Skill Academies

Academies engage cohorts of 40-50 participants to practice skills, discuss, reflect, and share resources. They feature three 90-minute customized workshops, supplemental self-paced activities, and platform support for ongoing collaboration and community of practice. Topics include:

OER Fundamentals: facilitated, experiential learning for a cohort of practitioners around finding, adopting, and remixing high-quality open educational resources.

OER Advanced Skills: building on foundational knowledge, these sessions explore deeper skills around curation, evaluation, and frameworking of high-quality OER.

OER Authoring: focused on creating, developing, and authoring OER. Cohorts will dive into courseware improvement, leveraging supports for peer review, reflection, refinement, and publishing of resources.

Subject-Specific Intensives

These sessions leverage OER but focus on broader, intersectional teaching and educational practices. Typically, intensives will be collaboratively shaped with your team and feature a blend of live workshops, asynchronous activities, and additional support. Current offerings include:

Culturally Responsive Teaching Intensive: OER are uniquely suited for customizing resources to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of students. This research-informed intensive is oriented around identifying bias in learning materials, evaluating OER for cultural relevance, and adapting resources to reflect a more diverse set of viewpoints and bring real-world alignment into the classroom.  This Intensive can support up to 100 participants, and includes eight to ten 90-minute sessions facilitated by subject matter experts along with self-paced activities.

Accessibility Intensive: the dynamic nature of OER are well-suited for customizing resources to meet the accessibility needs of students and being responsive to continuous change. This intensive is oriented around best practices for authoring accessible learning materials and adapting existing OER to be more inclusive. It will provide participants with accessibility frameworks, as well as the skills and practice necessary to bring greater accessibility to their classrooms. The series also includes platform support for ongoing collaboration and community of practice among participants.

Curriculum Evaluation: this intensive centers on evaluating OER in the context of specific K12 or higher education academic standards and builds skills for educators around aligning those resources with relevant rubrics or frameworks. In the process, participants will evaluate and review a swath of existing OER, in a focus area collaboratively designed to meet your needs. It includes three live webinars with follow-up self-paced engagement.

Teaching Practices Intensive: this intensive focuses on building skills around research-backed teaching practices like project-based learning, social emotional learning, and more, while leveraging the potential of OER and open practice to strengthen effectiveness. This includes three 90-minute sessions with self-paced engagement activities throughout.

Building Leaders and Scaling Initiatives

At the core of our work is helping partners create sustainable, scalable initiatives – a key piece of which is developing leaders and empowering them with the skills they need to level up their programs. These offerings focus more on building skills around program management, advocacy, community building, and more.

OER Train-the-Trainer Intensive: ISKME will develop and facilitate a custom training intensive for educators, librarians, and administrators who will be responsible for guiding and supporting other practitioners in their OER work. Tailored to the specific goals of your school or institution, the intensive will include eight 90-minute live webinars and self-paced activities for up to 15 participants

OER Fellowship Program: this is a less intensive, longer-term program designed to facilitate mentorship, communities of practice, and inter-departmental collaboration. In year 1, the focus is on leadership development, effective organizing, and program management in the open educational field. In year 2, the program focuses on mentoring others, building out the community, and developing a core project of their own.

Custom Content for Your Needs

Interested in a topic or structure you don’t see listed? ISKME’s expertise covers a wide range of topics, and we can create customized professional development for your unique strategy, constituency, and budget. Whether it’s a single-topic webinar, an asynchronous course to offer to practitioners, or an ongoing professional learning package, we bring a collaborative, thoughtful approach to supporting practitioners.

Make Your OER More Discoverable

Help educators find the right content, when they need it. Our curation and metadata services ensure that a wealth of  learning materials are easily discoverable, helpfully frameworked, and properly contexted for your intended outcomes.

Curation and Collection Development: ISKME’s expert librarians will sort through the spectrum of existing OER and build collections around your desired areas. They will collaboratively aggregate and arrange content, ensure that resources have quality metadata, and can incorporate standards-alignment or other lenses in the process.

Content Mapping and Pathways: Our team will work with you and your key constituencies to develop customized tagging frameworks and align open learning content to specific course catalogs or learning pathways. Resulting taxonomies and documentation will be openly licensed and can be used as tools for future work to support the ongoing shift to openly licensed learning materials.

Community Curation Facilitation: ISKME will work closely with your content partners – such as historical and cultural organizations, or faculty and librarians at your institution/organization – to build sustainable content delivery processes that ensure these high-quality resources are continuously added to your collections. This may also include development of training materials that can be implemented or leveraged by your team in the future.

Policy and Guidelines Support: ISKME’s team will work directly with your librarians or other content management teams to develop curation policies and guidelines that inform how resources get added to your digital learning collections.