As i was reflecting on Werner’s post, a description of two stages in the adoption of OERs emerged for me, which i wanted to offer for discussion:
- Stage 1: Aligning the OER with specific (national) curriculum outcomes. In the cases he mentions, Chile and Honduras, sense-making is required to sort out which resources are relevant to which “curriculum outcome”. We could describe this as “curation to the curriculum”.
- Stage 2: Teachers selecting the resources they can put to use in their classrooms, which we could describe as “curation in the classroom”.
This first stage can impact at least two groups:
- The authorities that manage said curriculum: the alignment work makes it easier to build trust with the resources, at least because it becomes easier to examine the materials’ alleged relevance.
- Teachers in their classrooms: The output of stage 1 provides teachers -especially those that are pressed for time [i’m imagining there are teachers out there that are not pressed for time]- with readily available resources that have been neatly “sorted out”. This facilitates the work at the next stage.
In the second stage, the teachers are provided with a “limited” number of resources (instead of a large library where they need to conduct time-consuming searches) that have been sorted to fit explicitly with the outcomes they are expected to work on with their students. The educators can now make decisions about which materials might be more pertinent to certain groups within their classrooms, personalizing the interactions with the groups as needed including making adaptations and providing context for their use to the students.
Another impact in that “second stage” could be observed during the pandemia: At Learning Equality, we observed a growing interest by different actors in education -a need even- for students to become better able to select materials they could use to enrich their learning. For many students, living in “remote” areas, contact with the teachers became at best limited. Thus, having access to a collection of materials that were aligned to the curriculum became relevant to students and their families.