Creating Systems of Sustainability: Four Focus Areas for the Future of PK-12 Open Educational Resources

Over the past few years, state and school district education leaders have renewed their focus on the quality of learning materials available in our nation’s classrooms (Chiefs for Change, 2017; RAND Corp., 2016; RAND Corp., 2017). Many leaders have been dismayed to find that existing proprietary textbooks and supplementary resources often do not match their teachers’ and students’ needs (Ishmael, 2018a). Fortunately, there is a growing recognition of teachers and school leaders who are addressing this challenge head-on through open educational resources.

Simply put, open educational resources, or OER, are “high quality teaching, learning, and research resources that are free for others to use and repurpose”(Hewlett Foundation, 2015). OER range from entire curricula and textbooks to smaller grain-size learning materials, including assessments, videos and images.