OER

Open Educational Resources really has my interest... I had heard of this term briefly before taking this class but not really known all of the definitions. The video that we watched explaining how Open Education would affect so many students made me wonder why anyone would not support this movement. If you have the students best interest at heart, this seems like a "no-brainer" situation to me. If schools all over the world can be giving all the students the same information and have a unified curriculum, I think that would be great. I can see textbook companies having a problem with this and all of the small curriculum corporations... but that shouldn't be a reason for not doing what is best for the students.

Right now a problem that my school is facing is that the curriculum between buildings and teachers is so different that the students are graduating with such different levels of education. We are also having students favor one teacher over another that teach the same content... how can this be if they are teaching the same class? Come to find out the teachers are making up the curriculum as they see fit and there is no uniform way of instruction or what is given to the students.

This gets tricky for my class because there is no curriculum at the state level for my class. My colleagues and I have made our entire curriculum based on what we think meets our content standards. If there was a resource for my class that was free and aligned with all other districts, I think that would be great. I can see how this could be difficult with pleasing so many teachers and people wanting to do it there own way, but it would at least give us somewhere to start. It is so hard making up a class from nothing.

This has not been brought up in our district yet but it wouldn't surprise me if this was something that was discussed.