Key Takeaways
State leaders are beginning to think deeply about the role they can play in supporting districts and schools as they make curriculum decisions. While the vast majority of states leave these choices to local education leaders, state leaders have a critical role in information sharing, promoting equitable access to high-quality materials, and removing barriers to adoption. The insights provided by leaders across the country have highlighted five key takeaways for other states hoping to tap into OER to provide more equitable access to high-quality curricula.
1. Integrate OER Initiatives Within State Curriculum Work
States are making huge strides in their work to ensure districts and schools have access to the best materials, regardless of how those materials are licensed. The most successful efforts have integrated OER initiatives within state curriculum work. State leaders across offices of instruction, assessment, technology, and others have found the most success when tackling this work collaboratively.
Where state leaders have undertaken specific OER work, they have discovered another benefit: open content has allowed them to more seamlessly connect their curriculum efforts. In the curriculum review process, states have encountered fewer barriers to accessing all components of an open curriculum. Additionally, states have been able to seek out and vet curriculum-embedded professional development opportunities built around open curricula. They have also found that a larger variety of vendors—not to mention service agencies and districts—are able to support teachers using specific content that they are using in the classroom. Further, states have found that OER can be connected in one place, integrated within and across a variety of online platforms and solutions.
2. Adapt, Improve, and Share, Rather Than Start From Scratch
With a wealth of openly licensed curricula, instructional materials, rubrics, and professional development supports, states looking to initiate this work are finding that they no longer need to start from scratch. The vast majority of state efforts have adapted and improved upon work that started elsewhere. While every state and district context is different, none need to start from scratch or undertake this work alone. Further, because every state has taken a slightly different approach to this work, there is a large network of state leaders to turn to for best practices and lessons learned.
States have adapted, improved, and shared resources developed by other states, the most prominent example being the number of states across the country that have shared the high-quality EngageNY curricula with their districts and teachers. States have also shared rubrics for evaluating materials, shared information and best practices through state collaborations, and considered ways in which other states’ policies can be adapted to their own contexts.
3. Identify Sustainable Funding
States that have undertaken OER efforts have begun to find that once they invest in the initial development costs, the long-term savings can be substantial. Though OER are free or low-cost to use and print, these high-quality open curriculum and instructional materials can require ongoing investment to create and maintain. States that have demonstrated the value of their OER work and found ways to integrate their efforts into existing funding streams have been most successful in sustaining this work.
Further, where no other resources currently exist, states have been able to step in to ensure that district curriculum needs are met. Especially in subject areas outside ELA and math, states may find that these investments are more cost-effective than having every district create its own resources from scratch.
4. Consider Implementing State-Level Policies to Support Efforts
State education leaders are beginning to embrace the idea that publicly funded educational resources should be openly available for the public to view and use. As this view takes hold, state leaders have considered policies that can support it. At the highest level, this can include adopting policies that ensure resources created by the state are openly licensed. Further, states have identified other ways in which they can ensure the materials they are producing with taxpayer funds are openly available, whether through updating terms of state contracts, conditions of grant agreements, or procurement policies.
5. Invest in Rigorous Curriculum Research
Today, states are helping to evaluate curriculum quality based upon qualitative information about standards-alignment and usability of resources. While this is a good place to start, states would benefit from more efficacy research focused on how specific curricula impact student learning outcomes. Historically, this research has been difficult to conduct, in part because the vast majority of curricula and textbooks have been proprietary. The growing number of open curricula provide states with exciting new opportunities for efficacy research.
The transparency and adaptability of open curricula offer up new research designs that have not been possible in the past. For example, a study could examine a newly adopted curriculum, and study its implementation in different classrooms using print, digital, and digital adaptive versions. States have the opportunity to partner with districts and researchers to begin to answer specific questions about the kinds of elements and features that make a given curriculum more or less effective.