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The Learning Accelerator, a Bay Area nonprofit working to implement high-quality blended learning in U.S. school districts, has announced a $2 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to create comprehensive, high-quality open educational resources aligned with state learning standards for Kâ12 mathematics and English language arts.
Every year, school districts across the country spend more than $8 billion on instructional materials. However, printed textbooks quickly fall into disrepair and their content becomes dated, while costly annual subscription fees for online content force many schools to lease classroom materials. Led by the Kâ12 OER Collaborative, a twelve-state initiative that includes a variety of nonprofit organizations, the initiative aims to create free resources that enable all students to master foundational skills and knowledge and achieve college and career readiness.
States in the collaborative include Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, and Washington. The Learning Accelerator also announced the names of ten content developers that will work with the collaborative to prototype educational content for review later this summer.
"The funding provided by the Hewlett Foundation and the Learning Accelerator's matching donors is an investment in our nation's future,â said Learning Accelerator CEO Scott Ellis. "Too many of our country's fifty million K-12 students and their teachers have gone too long with instructional materials that are, ironically, both costly and inadequate. Open educational resources are an important part of a comprehensive solution to improve student learning experiences and outcomes while freeing up budget dollars for other critical educational needs." |