State Support for Open Educational Resources: Key Findings from Achieve's OER Institute

Tuesday, September 17, 2013Printer-friendly version

Since 2012, seven states—California, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, Washington, and Wisconsin—have agreed to work together in Achieve’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Institute. The goal of OER Institute is to bring these states together to discuss issues and policy barriers surrounding using OER in college- and career-ready standards implementation. In addition to describing this initiative and providing appendices that detail each of the seven OER Institute state’s efforts, this brief released in 2013 includes three potential areas for cross-state collaboration to support the use of OER:

  • Establishing commonalities in defining quality
  • Sharing quality, standards-aligned resources
  • Sharing metadata about quality resources

The brief also describes four key findings to date from the OER Institute:

  • States face a number of common challenges and barriers to implementation, including a lack of knowledge about OER and uncertainty about the quality of resources available online.
  • Experts from multiple sectors, including standards, curriculum and technology, must work together to use OER successfully in CCSS implementation.
  • States must develop a common understanding of processes for measuring quality and vetting resources.
  • States must assess their technology and capacity needs to implement technology-based innovations.

Achieve will be continuing this work through providing virtual and in-person convenings for OER Institute states, providing  state-specific assistance to implement plans related to OER and hosting OER materials review sessions.