Case Studies
K-12
Open High School of Utah
The Open High School of Utah is an online public charter school that uses OER exclusively for its curriculum. Fully accredited, the school now counts 250 students in grades 9 and 10 with 11th graders to be added in 2011 and 12th graders in 2012.
Oregon Virtual School District
The Oregon Virtual School District is funded by the state legislature and provides materials for free use by public school teachers throughout the state. The district is primarily a repository of learning materials, course templates and other resources that individual teachers can access and adapt to fit their classroom needs. By providing customizable resources, the program helps infuse multimedia content into the classroom by overcoming resource and technology barriers.
Omaha, Nebraska Public Schools
Omaha Public Schools successfully uses Open Educational Resources to help students who need to make up credits to graduate. By using OER, Omaha has been able to serve a larger number of students than through traditional classroom settings. This means students in need of such support are not forced to wait for classroom slots to open to obtain needed credits. OER also enables the district to offer courses in multiple formats, including those that leverage online tools to reach students with a variety of learning needs.
Florida FreeReading Program
The state of Florida has approved the FreeReading program for elementary school students. Beginning with the 2008-2009 school year, teachers and districts within Florida began using FreeReading’s Intervention A program as an approved intervention tool. The program is aligned to Florida state standards so that it complements textbooks and other resources.
Virginia Open Physics Flexbook
During the summer of 2007, the Virginia State Department of Education realized their high school physics textbook wasn’t working – it was out of date and did not include information about new scientific advancements. With various stakeholders from both the private and public sectors engaged, the Secretaries of Technology and Education developed an open physics textbook developed under unobstructed licenses, which was released last spring.
California Digital Textbook Initiative
Facing a crushing budget deficit during the spring of 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California’s classrooms would be getting rid of traditional textbooks. Calling textbooks “outdated,” “antiquated,” and “expensive,” Governor Schwarzenegger released 10 free, digital textbooks that meet state education standards for the 2009-2010 school year.
Higher Education
Washington State Student Completion Initiative and Open Course Library Project
The Open Course Library Project is about designing 81 high enrollment, important general education, and pre-college courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery, to improve course completion rates, lower textbook costs for students, provide new resources for faculty to consider using in their courses, and for our college system to fully engage the global open educational [...]
United States Federal
National Institute of Health Public Access Policy
The Open Access movement champions the idea that the public should have access to the research that arises from taxpayer funding. The National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy “requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.” Through the [...]
International
OpenLearn in the United Kingdom
OpenLearn is an initiative by the Open University (OU), the United Kingdom’s distance learning and research university with an open policy for entry. OU has been a pioneer in making learning materials freely available through its successful partnership with the BBC, and now with OpenLearn, it offers a full range of Open University subject areas [...]
Korea University Open Courseware
Korea University firstly launched its open courseware program in 2009, after joining the OCW consortium in 2007. Korea University OpenCourseWare provides lecture materials for ten departments, including the departments of Technology, Law, and Education. Korea University is also organizing open courseware (Korea Open Courseware) among domestic universities. Including Korea University, nine universities have implemented open [...]
SNOW in South Korea
SNOW is an open knowledge platform for sharing higher education content. From lectures in the humanities, sciences, design to great addresses given by global leaders, SNOW offers Korean scripts and introductions on these academic subjects, encouraging its users to participate as volunteers who can participate in the OER movement through translations, distribution and creation of [...]
We Read While We’re Listening (Czytamy słuchając) in Poland
We Read While We’re Listening (Czytamy słuchając) is an open educational resources project by the Modern Poland Foundation (which is part of the Coalition for Open Education) and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The project creates free access to audio versions of obligatory school reading material (the Polish school system has a [...]
Orange Academy (Akademia Orange) in Poland
Orange Academy (Akademia Orange) is a grant program for cultural education projects that is funded by the Orange Foundation (Fundacja Orange), a nonprofit, charitable branch of the Polish part of the Orange telecom operator. The licensing policy for all content funded through the Orange Academy is CC Attribution. The Orange Academy funds around 30 grants per [...]
Norwegian National Digital Learning Arena
The Norwegian National Digital Learning Arena (NDLA) is an open educational resources (OER) project and open source platform for sharing OER in secondary education. It is a joint initiative by different provinces in Norway that allocates a portion of state funds to ensure free access to textbooks for Norwegian students and to develop digital resources (or [...]
Otago Polytechnic
Otago Polytechnic is a publicly-subsidised vocational education and training organisation in Dunedin, New Zealand, that offers a range of open access training courses. Otago Polytechnic is the first tertiary institution in the world to adopt a default CC Attribution policy and the first New Zealand tertiary institution to sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.
This case study [...]
OERNZ in New Zealand
OER NZ is a joint effort by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and the OER Foundation to build an open educational resources (OER) portal for New Zealand schools. In keeping with the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework, which specifically recommends “the licensing of government copyright works for re-use using Creative Commons [...]
Computer Masti in India
Computer Masti (CM) is a series of books, activities, and interactive content for computer education in primary schools in India. It is a research-based product created at the IIT Bombay in collaboration with InOPEN, a tech start-up that works with Free and Open Source (FOSS) technologies. The books are available online under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike with [...]
Pratham Books in India
Pratham Books is a non-profit children’s book publishing house in India that uses CC licenses, specifically CC Attribution and CC Attribution-ShareAlike, to further distribution, translation and reuse of its works. The books are available for purchase at low cost or for free online at their Scribd channel. Pratham Books also has a Flickr account where they publish pictures of [...]
Le Mill in Finland
Le Mill is an online community for “finding, authoring and sharing” open educational resources (OER). Le Mill was developed by the LeMill team led by the Learning Environments Research Group of Media Lab at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland. As of November 2010, Le Mill has nearly ~15,000 teachers contributing from 63 [...]
RVP Metodicky Portal in the Czech Republic
The RVP Metodicky Portal is an educational portal to Czech open educational resources (OER) licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike and CC Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives. It is a government-funded initiative by the Czech Republic and the European Social Fund, and is run as part of a research project by the Institute of Education in Prague and the National Institute of Vocational Education. [...]
