![]() Department of Education view that OERs serve as productivity and cost-saving tools: “the use of OER and other technologies can increase educational productivity by accelerating the rate of learning reducing costs associated with instructional materials or program delivery and better utilizing teacher time” (U.S. They enable teachers to adapt instruction to meet their goals and students’ needs, such as by using logged student work or observations of student collaboration to inform their next step in guiding understanding.Įven with the widespread access to networked computers in American schools and the distribution of computers in response to COVID-19, most schools use OER to implement materials that emphasize transmission of information (Cambridge, 2018 Johnson, 2020). ![]() They encourage students to play with data to generate new ideas, explore alternative hypotheses, or test and revise explanations of phenomenon. These OERs include research-based features that foster teacher and student agency, consistent with the goals of open education practices (Bali et al., 2020 Hilton, 2020). Some OERs that support self-directed science learning are standalone tools such as interactive models and virtual experiments developed by Phet, Chem Collective and others (Wilkerson-Jerde et al., 2015 De Jong, 2019), whereas other web-based platforms amalgamate multiple OERs to create lessons such as Concord Consortium (Hardy et al., 2019), the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment ( WISE) (Ulus & Oner, 2020 Williams et al., 2012), and nQuire (Sharples et al., 2015). OERs featuring scientific models, collaborative activities, and independent data exploration have shown success in guiding student knowledge integration in middle and high school science (Donnelly et al., 2014 Linn & Eylon, 2011) and in developing self-directed science learners (Hardy et al., 2019 Lee et al., 2019). ![]() While most current computer-based materials take little advantage of the power of technology, substantial research documents the effectiveness of some OER to invite new avenues for teacher agency, and for student-driven creation and exploration in science (Miller et al., 2021). Self-directed learning is characterized by taking responsibility to reflect on one’s understanding, identifying gaps or questions, determining what resources will help one progress, and pursuing those resources to improve one’s understanding (Azevedo & Hadwin, 2005 Hmelo Silver, 2004 Kyza, 2009). Self-directed Learning and Instructional Technologies The ways in which these teachers leveraged OER for remote instruction has implications for how OER may be used to facilitate student-led science education for remote or in-person instruction. While OERs have the potential to foster students’ self-directed learning, they are rarely used for this purpose across US classrooms and especially in science (Cuban, 2018 Hilton, 2016). OERs are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities-retaining, remixing, revising, reusing, and redistributing the resources (Creative Commons, 2021 Hilton, 2020). We report on how twelve teachers identified and creatively leveraged customizable, scaffolded, and interactive open educational resources (OERs) to implement remote science instruction. However, they soon realized that to offset the in-class guidance and peer collaboration that typically sustained student engagement, their students would need self-directed learning capabilities. Wanting to retain compelling science learning experiences such as conducting experiments, resolving conundrums in data sets, and discussing alternatives with peers, teachers turned to technology. There was widespread concern among teachers as they rapidly transitioned from classroom to remote instruction. My principal is wonderful, but it is nebulous,” remarked a middle school teacher after California’s shelter-in-place mandate in March 2020. We are on all these meetings about how to do Zoom, Google hangouts … but there is no cohesiveness.
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