Tonight I watched the Open Ed 2021 recorded session entitled “Opening Opportunities for Teacher Education: A Project Funded by the U.S. Department of Education” and presented by Tim Anderson, System Director for Student Success Technologies at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, Stephen Kelly (Innovation Program Director at Minnesota State), and Kim Lynch (Senior System Director of Educational innovations at Minnesota State). Lynch started by describing the reach and impact of the Minnesota State system and the goals of this project. The state has been promoting OER through webinars, FAQs, community conversations, learning communities, librarian workshops, Creative Common’s Certification… and Zero-Textbook Cost Degrees. Several colleges in the system converted two-year degrees to Z-degree paths. Lynch described how they have promoted the success of the system to increase the efforts and adoption. Anderson spoke about the grant they received and the shortage of teachers. One survey in the state indicated that 90% of districts had challenges in hiring teachers. Further, Anderson showed data that the racial achievement gap in the state is one of the largest. The four goals of the project are to:
- Reduce the financial burden of textbooks.
- Remove access barriers to textbooks and course content.
- Reduce the teacher shortage and need for more teachers of color.
- Increase cultural relevance by addressing the need for culturally responsive content.
For this, five courses in the teacher education curriculum will be developed using OER. Kelly then spoke about the development of open curriculum. The first step is to create an open inventory by identifying open materials and encouraging open licensing on copyright materials. The open inventory will then be evaluated by teachers. The list will then be refined to build the teacher education inventory. They will then check for alignment between objectives and OER available. The “OER Opportunity Analysis” will help them decide which topics to focus on for OER development. After that, they will focus on faculty & personnel training. Faculty members will then work alongside instructional designers applying an inTASC standards rubric. Faculty can work either individually or in teams to create materials. I thought it was interesting that they included equity coaches to help with the authoring of appropriate culturally relevant examples! Kelly described that they will create SCORM packages and folders that can be implemented and connected with the learning management system. All resources will include specifications and guidelines, they said! The finishing touches include an accessibility review before launching. They will upload all their materials to Opendora, the state’s OER repository. This project seems very ambitious and also carefully planned. It also helps get OER to areas of great need. I learned from this twenty-one-minute session about the process they plan to take and the resources they will build upon.
