Open Educational Resources Interview Series: Collaboration with Vista Unified School District
Diving into open educational resources (OER) with leading educators
By Melissa Gedney
The Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools is a national network of the most forward-thinking education leaders. League districts are working together to improve outcomes for students and solve the challenges facing K-12 schools through powerful and smart use of learning technologies.
With the help of Education Elements and Amazon Education, we recently conducted a series of interviews with members of the League on best practices in open educational resources (OER).
This week, we’re featuring our conversation with Dr. Erin English, Director of Curriculum and Online Instruction at Vista Unified School District in California, on the role collaboration plays in scaling OER across a district. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Could you describe the work happening in and around OER in Vista? How did it start? Where are you now?
It started about two years ago when our former superintendent Devin Vodicka went to a #GoOpen summit and signed the pledge to be a #GoOpen district. Signing the pledge only entailed having one class at one school using OER materials. We said, “Hey, we can do that!”
We have a school called Vista Visions Academy, which was already almost there. It’s a blended and online program, and teachers create their own courses based on the state standard. So we refined it, and reframed our teacher-created materials as OER.
But then we started looking at other possibilities. We chose to look at middle school because it had less requirements and rigidity in terms of switching over as compared to high school.
In what ways did you leverage collaboration? What are some examples?
Another project Devin got us involved in was the COW Project, a collaboration with League districts Mentor Public Schools in Ohio and Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin. Because we were collaborating on a student project across state lines with so many different standards, we couldn’t use a textbook. One hundred eighty students and two teachers — social studies and science — were involved in the collaboration at Vista. We still had the textbooks available as a resource to students, but we asked all the teachers to go beyond the textbooks to gather information.
It’s important to note that with the Williams Act in the state of California, every district still has to have a board-adopted textbook. We still really wanted to get OER into our curriculum and instruction department, so we hosted an OER summit last November and invited people from all over the state and country. At one point of the day, we had a federal Department of Education representative there, we had a state Department of Education representative there, and a county Department of Education representative there. It was a great moment, because we were all there, on the same page, all looking forward to using OER.
Since then, our state has become an OER state. Our state now has exemplars saying they want all schools to be using OER materials, which is new — never happened, never been written anywhere before now.
What are some other ways you have leveraged collaboration in your district?
Our work has been advanced by our partnerships with Future Ready, the League of Innovative Schools and Digital Promise, Follett, Discovery Education, and Amazon. Those are companies I could pick up the phone with and say, “Hey, we’re doing these projects,” and a lot of the different companies we’re working with already have places for us to curate materials. We also work with the Alliance for Excellent Education, and the Office of Education Technology.
This year, we started working to become Future Ready Librarians. Mark Ray from Vancouver Public Schools spoke to our group about what it means to be a Future Ready Librarian, and our folks are becoming the curators of content for teachers. Now we’re coming together to write our vision and plan for a library media tech group so it meets the requirement of being OER. The purpose of this is not to eliminate cost; as you know, it’s not always free. It’s about providing relevant content to our kids so they can access the content anytime anywhere.
I would say that is a huge part of our collaboration. Librarians had to get outside of their comfort zone to understand we were honoring them for being curators of content, and in our district, they weren’t always seen that way. They’d all been doing it on the side; we never really put it out there that they are the experts and the place to start.
What is the power of collaboration for teachers?
They get the explicit and implicit permission to innovate. They have a chance to get credibility for the lessons they have been creating using the OER.
What do you think there is to be gained from collaborating around OER?
A chance for synergy. We can build something we didn’t have before based on perspectives. You have to get to another place when you bring in other people with different ideas. If you continue working with the same people with the same ideas, there’s less growth. If we bring in other folks and they gain a little bit, we will gain a little bit more each time in ideas and growth potential. It’s validating the work we do, and exposing us to new ideas. The investment of OER is giving us creative workarounds on any restrictions we had.
How has OER implementation changed over the course of your two years?
Both at the district and state level, we now have permission to leverage OER; we just have to do it within the guidelines. What we have now is outdated textbooks but current content in the classroom.
We had a fun meeting last year when I was trying to explain to the teachers working on the COW Project that you need outside resources, you can’t just stick to the textbook. I pointed to a textbook in the classroom and said, “That book back there is probably five years old.” A disbelieving teacher got up, walked to the back of the classroom, and the book was actually 12 years old. The book was as old as the kids in her classroom, and it was a social studies class.
It made my point: is the content relevant? Are we doing the right thing for kids? Maybe the right solution is the book, but if the content isn’t right, let’s work together to find what’s right for kids.
Stay tuned for our next conversation with Mike Nagler, Superintendent of Mineola Union Free School District.
