Saylor K-12 Beta by The Saylor Foundation / CC BY

The Saylor Foundation recently launched a new K-12 program on Saylor.org, debuting courses for grades 6-12 in English language arts and mathematics. A team of experienced educators and staff are developing courses fully aligned to the US Common Core State Standards. Like Saylor’s college-level courses, the K-12 program incorporates open educational resources (OER), making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide. The course frameworks and instructions are available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Thus, while the courses are ready for use as-is, anyone may also reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute their courses to meet local needs.

Following its higher education model, Saylor’s K-12 team focused on reviewing and vetting an existing pool of OER, selecting the best OER to develop instructions and learning outcomes. With Common Core standards providing a framework for each course, Saylor aims to make K-12 OER easy to find and use. Saylor is currently working on 18 additional courses which will be rolled out as they are completed.

How can you use K-12 courses on Saylor.org?

Teachers:

• Flip your classroom without shooting your own videos. Saylor provides recommendations on their site.
• Incorporate more engaging digital content in your class.

Schools:

• Get current, openly licensed, Common Core–aligned materials for free.

Parents:

• Provide extra resources to supplement what your kids learn in school.
• Use self-contained curriculum for home-schooling families.
• Accelerate or review subjects with your kids.

Students:

• Do more challenging work. Your school might not offer calculus, but Saylor.org does!
• Learn subjects in a different way and acclimate to an online learning environment.
• Review material you learned in school.
• Go further and prepare for your SATs/college (more on that on the site).