By sharing publicly funded learning materials as OER, we can move away from “recreating the wheel” in all 50 states and territories, enabling sharing and collaboration with learning materials, resources, and professional development.
Maximizing state, district and school resources in sustaining an environment of sharing and collaboration, this guide is meant to share bellwether state examples and recommendations as a guide for policy makers.

While specific recommendations are made at the end of this document, there are key principles to consider in enabling sharing of learning materials:

• Emphasize that materials created by state, regional, or local entities using public funds will hold an open license for sharing, collaboration, and access for all educators and students.
• Allow states with instructional materials lists to include OER.
• Allow instructional materials and other funding to support development, maintenance, and infrastructure for OER and technology infrastructure with flexible uses of funding.

Open educational resources can be a solution to many areas of work that states are engaged in today. Some of these areas include moving to prepare students for college and careers through benchmarks via the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), better integrating their systems of curriculum, instruction, assessment, data, and technology, and focusing on the need to innovate and personalize learning to better engage students and lead the transformation toward student-centered education systems.

Today’s textbooks are obsolete and the acquisition process is broken. The use of OER is a solution that permits delivery of customized content to students much faster and more cost effectively than the current system allows. Open and public domain licenses for educational content that is developed with public funding will provide students and educators with increased access to the information they need to succeed and enable public access to publicly funded educational materials for sharing.

Keywords

K-12 · OER barriers · OER benefits · OER creation · OER policy · OER policy models · OER textbooks