Professional Learning

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practice (OEP) open the door to increased equity and social justice in education. ISKME offers professional learning around the foundations of OER/OEP, then builds on those foundations with training covering accessibility and culturally responsive teaching.

Our Approach to Open Educational Practice

When educators adopt OER, we see a shift in their teaching and learning practices to help advance a culture of sharing and active learning. Our OEP Professional Learning offerings support educators in developing their skills around collaboration, curation, design, leadership, and continuous improvement of OER.

Join our Professional Learning Communities to participate in curation, evaluation, and creation of Professional Learning OER focused on open educational practice, accessibility, and culturally responsive teaching.

Interested in working with ISKME to meet your professional learning goals? Contact us!

Open Educational Practice Collaborators

ISKME and OER Commons partner closely with educational organizations at many different levels to support Open Educational Practices (OEP).

See some of our partners discussing how OEP impacts both educators and students.

 

Our Approach to Creating & Evaluating Resources for Accessibility

OER has been licensed so that it is free to access by anyone anywhere. With a license that allows for remixing, resources may be further adapted to meet the needs of all learners. ISKME has prioritized the study and promotion of accessible OER through our partnership with CAST and our work to meet WCAG guidelines across our digital libraries. 

Our Accessibility-focused Professional Learning Academies pair the accessibility tools of the OER Commons platform with the content knowledge of experts to provide educators with an introduction to specific tools, strategies, and resources that prioritize the adaptation and creation of resources to better meet the needs of all learners, no matter the accommodation needed.

 

Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning Collections

Our Approach to Culturally Responsive Teaching

Culturally Relevant Teaching was defined by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings as an approach that "requires a focus on students' learning, an attempt to develop their cultural competence, and to increase their sociopolitical or critical consciousness" (Ladson-Billings). This approach has been expanded to include the necessity of being culturally and lingusitically responsive and sustaining by the work of Dr. Geneva Gay, Dr. Django Paris, Dr. Zaretta Hammond and Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, among many others.

OER are especially important to this approach because these resources are designed to be openly shared and adapted, which is key to being relevant, responsive and sustaining to the needs of students. As educators engage in a journey of being culturally responsive and sustaining, OER Commons has curated some resources to support curation, collaboration, and creation.

To support deep collaboration, OER Commons offers Culturally Responsive Teaching Professional Learning series that support educators as they do the deep work of identifying and redressing harmful bias and adapting resources to include a more diverse set of viewpoints in education. 

See the materials below to see excerpts from some of our Professional Learning Series.

 

Frameworks & Guides Related to Culturally Responsive Teaching