Open Educational Resource(OER) Math “Distributions”
In the past decade or so, the math community has seen a veritable cornucopia of freely available (and often freely licensed) math instructional materials.
Three Act Math tasks, rich interactives, Engage New York (later commercialized as Eureka Math)… and more recently Open Up Resources (which was created by Illustrative Mathematics… this post will not wade into a controversy over attribution from this summer). IM has gone on to license their curriculum with other providers as well which is great for an OER based curriculum — let the other providers differentiate based on service provides, third party tools and resources etc. This is all good for the math community. Late in 2018, SFUSD also published their own OER math curriculum which I blogged about as well (And is my most popular post by about 1000 views).
So today’s announcement by Desmos about now being a curriculum company — a Desmosified middle school OER curriculum built off of Illustrative Mathematics — is huge news. We are starting to see the benefits of an OER Math curriculum that is done right proliferate and adapt to the market needs rather than the other way around. What I mean by that is by all accounts IM’s math is truly made by expert curriculum writers with progressions, conceptually driven instruction, and assessment bundled together and well done.
Historical Background from Another Industry
In the early 1990’s a Finnish software developer named Linux Torvalds created an open source clone of the kernel (‘what makes it run’) of the Unix operating system. He called it Linux and a community grew around it. Soon there were multiple repackagings of Linux… some variants (called Distributions) have merged over the years, hundreds of died out, and there isn’t a ‘one true Linux’ anymore for sure. The main differences are how the UI included, the additional packages (and licenses of) etc — but at their core, they all run the Linux kernel in some form or another. If you use a phone running Android or a Chromebook, you can thank Linux too.
There have been major problems sometimes with this ‘core drift’ over the years — software made for linux that only works on certain distributions etc. But overall, diversity has made Linux stronger as people can tailor a base to a specific need… and save a TON of time to do so in the process. In many ways that is the
The Current
Illustrative Mathematics has certified partners including McGraw HIll, Kendall Hunt, and Learnzillion who sell its curriculum and related professional development and implementation partners. I don’t know the details of how/if that content changes if they tell IM. In addition, Open Up Resources seems to also now be running it’s own fork of the original content and has added high school. While it may be getting a little confusing for now, the more vendors using OER math curriculums as a base just means better math tasks are getting used in more innovative ways and reaching more students. Proprietary math content isn’t bad — it just usually hasn’t been tested as much as most of the open resources out there. What math teacher out there hasn’t heard of Andrew Stadel’s File Cabinet post it problem?
The Future
The more OER math curriculums out there the better. In fact I just made a website to better track these trends — oermath.org which just redirects to a new series here on Medium.
Ideally anything published from these base OER curriculums retains the open license and publishes with interoperability specifications like Common Cartridges, uses CASE to identify learning standards… and more that I’ll cover in a future post.
Congrats Desmos and I can’t wait to see how this new curriculum helps kids!
