This crash course guides K-12 teachers in the creation of open educational resources that may be freely used by educators anywhere. This website provides content for this course, but the actual course should be taught in a hybrid face-to-face or online setting with a skilled facilitator. As a concrete take-away, participants will work with other educators to create standards-based, adaptive, open textbooks that may be used in their schools and anywhere!

Intended Use

This set of online course content should be used in conjunction with a face-to-face, hybrid, or synchronous online course. As an example, this content is used as part of the University of Idaho Open Textbook Institutes, but it could also be used for school- or district-based professional development or within a teacher education course.

Research Basis

This course has been taught in conjunction with a research study to ascertain its effectiveness and keys for helping teachers develop essential open education literacies. Results of the research may be found in the following articles:

Kimmons, R. (2014). Developing open education literacies with practicing K-12 teachers. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 15(6).

Kimmons, R. (accepted). Expansive openness in teacher practice. Teachers College Record.

Course Organization

To meaningfully participate in the crash course, participants should be organized into professional learning communities (PLCs) of 5-6 people according to grade level and subject area. The more homogenous the group (e.g., 10th grade Biology teachers vs. general science), the easier it will be to create a valuable product. More information about successful implementation of the content in a course setting may be found in the provided research articles above.