Partnering Higher Education and K–12 Institutions in OER: Foundations in Supporting Teacher OER-Enabled Pedagogy

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v24i2.6856

Keywords:

OEP, renewable assignments, teacher education, K-12, higher education

Abstract

Open educational resources (OER) are disproportionately created and/or accessed by institutions of higher education as compared to K–12 even though teachers confront the challenge of outdated teaching materials or, worse, an increasing trend by school districts to discontinue textbook adoption altogether. In this paper, we describe a sustainable and innovative example of OER-enabled pedagogy (OEP) that partners teachers and students across institutional boundaries to address these problems. The Pathways Project (PP) is a higher education and K–12 community of 350 world-language teachers, students, and staff that engage in the 5Rs (retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) of OEP with a repository of more than 800 OER ancillary activities that support standards-based pedagogy for 10 world languages and cultures. The PP is innovative because it fosters renewable assignments for the entire disciplinary ecosystem unlike most OEP studies that discuss renewable assignments limited to a single course. Teacher education is one of the best places to engage OEP because teachers are trained to personalize and contextualize OER materials for their local classroom needs. In so doing, the PP community receives timely discipline-specific professional development that is in high demand, especially in rural communities where teachers are isolated. Higher education-K–12 OEP partnerships are rare, and yet teacher education programs exist in most universities and can be a logical place to start. This paper provides concrete examples and practical steps that are transferable to other disciplines looking to engage in similar types of OER-OEP collaboration and community engagement.

Author Biographies

Kelly Arispe, Boise State University

Kelly Arispe (Ph.D. UC Davis), is an Associate Professor at Boise State University where she teaches upper-division Spanish Linguistics courses and Teacher Education courses in methods, literacy, and assessment for pre-service language teachers. She is the Program Coordinator for French, German, and Spanish Secondary Education Majors and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Computer Assisted Language Learning. Her primary research focuses on L2 OER-enabled Pedagogy (OEP) and Computer and Mobile Assisted Language Learning. She is co-director of the Pathways Project, an OER repository that hosts over 800 ancillary materials that foster interpersonal speaking and intercultural competence. She was recently awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to evaluate the impact of OER/OEP on K-12 urban and rural teacher practices in Idaho. She is also participating as an external researcher with VALIANT, which is an Erasmus+ KA3 project.

Amber Hoye, Boise State University

Amber Hoye (M.E.T., Boise State University) is the Director of the World Language Resource Center at Boise State University where she supports faculty in implementing educational technology and other innovative practice including OER. She supervises an interdisciplinary team of student employees and teaches a required course for language majors to prepare them for attending graduate school or entering the workforce. Her current projects include overseeing the creation of ancillary teaching materials in collaboration with university faculty, staff, students, and K-12 teachers, and managing the Pathways Project OER repository.

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Published

2023-03-13

How to Cite

Arispe, K., & Hoye, A. (2023). Partnering Higher Education and K–12 Institutions in OER: Foundations in Supporting Teacher OER-Enabled Pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 24(2), 196–212. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v24i2.6856

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 2 (2023)

Section

Notes From the Field

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