ISKME to Provide New Tools for Curation, Metadata Sharing, and Educator Training As Part of #GoOpen Educational Resources Initiative

OER Commons available for open content discovery, reuse, and authoring by #GoOpen districts and states

ISKME to Provide New Tools for Curation, Metadata Sharing, and Educator Training As Part of #GoOpen Educational Resources Initiative

OER Commons available for open content discovery, reuse, and authoring by #GoOpen districts and states

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—February 26, 2016—The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) will join Microsoft, Amazon, and other innovative platform providers in supporting school districts and educators as they transition to the use of high-quality, openly-licensed educational resources in their schools, the U.S. Department of Education announced today.

ISKME committed to provide broad support for #GoOpen, a campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use openly-licensed educational materials. Since the launch of #GoOpen 13 states and 40 districts have committed to use Open Educational Resources (OER) in their districts and schools.

ISKME’s OER Commons is a comprehensive digital public library that advances the collaborative use of OER among states, districts, schools, and partner organizations around the world. OER Commons offers expertly curated collections from over 400 content providers, with over 100,000 resources, structured group workflows, and tools for content authoring, remixing, evaluating, and version tracking for making the most of OER through continuous improvement.

As part of its commitment, ISKME will make available online training and tools for #GoOpen districts on open education practices and instructional shifts, including collaboration and reflection across the disciplines.

OER Commons, a founding partner of the Learning Registry, is making additional K-12 resource metadata available and is also announcing new content creation and remixing tools on its platform, including the ability to sequence OER material into full courses, and branded OER groups created for districts and states integrating OER into their teacher practice communities and Common Core implementation efforts.

At the #GoOpen Exchange hosted by the U.S. Department of Education in San Francisco today, ISKME unveiled new platform features that enable both the integration of openly licensed educational resources into school district platforms and sharing between OER Commons via LTI for popular learning management systems (LMS), including Moodle, D2L, Canvas, Brainhoney, and Blackboard.

“Educators recognize the value of OER content to enrich their classrooms and improve their practice,” said ISKME CEO Lisa Petrides. “#GoOpen with educational resources is helping dramatically expand access to OER content and training while also coordinating efforts of technology providers, states and districts to put open education content to use to transform teaching and learning.”

 

About ISKME

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org), is an independent education nonprofit dedicated to improving the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. Established in 2002, ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe and is well known for its pioneering open education initiatives. ISKME also assists policy makers, foundations, and education institutions in designing, assessing, and bringing continuous improvement to education policies, programs, and practice.