OpenSkill develops open educational resources (Active OER) that promote essential workforce skills as part of a $3.4M funded program by the U.S. Department of Education. The development team includes Arizona State University's (ASU) Center for Education Through Exploration (ETX) and three of the largest community college systems in the country: Maricopa Community Colleges, Ivy Tech Community College, and Miami Dade College.
The process for creating our OER represents a unique multi-institutional collaboration between almost 60 faculty, numerous skilled learning designers, and program coordinators at each college. The underlying technology is open source and is taking advantage of a powerful new courseware authoring platform, allowing for contextualization of the content, by the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with ETX. The goal is to drive new interoperability standards as part of the project.
Institutions and faculty are supported by the Inspark Teaching Network at ASU’s Learning Enterprise, which provides training and professional development within a developing community of practice, all centered on active learning. The OER, underlying technology, and partnerships are all aimed at improving access to high quality learning experiences for low-income, minority, and first generation students.
Available OER combines Course Content Packages and Tools that can be combined to use as textbooks. OpenSkill Tools are customizable digital resources enabling active learning that foster essential skills, portable across disciplines. Active learning is at the heart of the OpenSkill vision because skills are best learned by doing. OpenSkill Tools can be used alone or supported with ready-to-use assignments, guides, and quality, existing OER materials, all made available on the OpenSkill Hub. Course Content Packages are curated OER developed with partner institutions to meet local needs.
Join us for a presentation of our design process, live demos, and information on how you can make use of the OER and get involved.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Use new cross-disciplinary open source tools
- See an example of multi-institutional collaboration
- Try a new courseware development platform
- Use content packages and tools as a textbook replacement
