Author:
Aubree Evans
Subject:
Education
Material Type:
Primary Source
Level:
College / Upper Division
Tags:
License:
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
Language:
English

About BranchED's OER Initiative

About BranchED's OER Initiative

Overview

This resource tells about the origin of BranchED's OER initiative. 

In Spring 2020 Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity launched our OER Content Development and Training Program with the goal of addressing gaps in the adoption of OER in the PK-12 arena, particularly in teacher education. You may see that gap if you go to OER commons and look at materials specifically for teacher preparation programs. There’s not much there yet. But we want to change that. 

BranchED identified three challenges that influence the widespread adoption of OER in teacher education, particularly in areas with students of color and low-income students. Those challenges are: 

(1) the lack of awareness among teacher education professors and in-service practitioners and 

(2) the lack of diversity of content curators and creators, which contributes to 

(3) the limited availability of culturally relevant OER content.

Our goal is to change this by providing training for creating content for and by MSI (Minority Serving Insitution) communities.  

We developed an OER initiative to empower teacher educators at MSIs nationwide. The first step was learning what our community already thought and knew about OER. 

To gather insights about the MSI EPP (Educator Preparation Program) community and OER, we conducted focus groups of 29 faculty at 19 MSIs nationwide. Our November 2019 focus group findings indicated that faculty at MSI EPPs think that OER should do the following:

  • Center diverse perspectives and be culturally responsive 

  • Be accessible 

  • Be practice-based (reflect what they do in the classroom) 

  • Be current 

  • Have variety (video, text, activities, articles, etc) 

  • Be high quality: peer reviewed, research-based, reliable, accurate 

  • Model OER use for teacher candidates to use when they are teaching 

  • Be collaborative 

This quote from the November 2019 focus groups summarizes a valuable aspect of OER:

“There is such a social justice act to taking down the walls of education and making it accessible to all and the sense that we are becoming a globe of people that share access to information.” 

The OER Content Development and Training Program seeks to raise awareness and encourage use of OER by providing training to MSI EPP faculty on OER content development and use. Over the summer of 2020, 6 faculty at MSI EPPs nationwide completed an 8-week OER training intensive in which they learned how to curate, evaluate, remix, and author OER. During the program, the faculty created OER modules for their unique areas of emphasis. You can find their modules in this folder. 

The BranchED initiative adds value to the MSI EPP community because we often hear from people they don’t know who is creating OER. We don’t know to what extent an author's identity, experience, or academic or career field might frame information or understanding of teacher education or communities of color. The BranchED Hub houses collections that have been saved for Teacher Educators at MSIs by Teacher Educators at MSIs. Even if we don’t know who is creating the content, if it’s in our collection, it has been saved or tagged by an MSI teacher educator in our community.