THE SUNSHINE STATE has taken some big steps towards becoming more acquainted with open education resources, or OERs. This week, California became the 16th state to join the #GoOpen initiative, with the state's Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announcing that he and his team were also launching Collaboration in Common, an online professional learning community for teachers to exchange resources.
Back in October 2015, the U.S. Office of Education Technology's #GoOpen initiative kicked off with 10 school districts pledging to use OERs during the 2016-2017 school year. Since then, several more states have added themselves to the roster—now including California. "This is a critical effort to provide schools with high-quality instructional resources and the ability to easily share these resources and ideas with teachers and schools across the state and the country," Torlakson said.
Taking part in this effort is teacher professional development platform Declara, which is powering the Collaboration in Common platform. This marks the first statewide U.S. adoption of a Declara product, who most recently facilitated countrywide PD in Australia and Mexico.
