AZ Education Superintendent Diane Douglas

Sedona AZ (March 2, 2016) – Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas today announced that the Arizona Department of Education is launching a #GoOpen initiative, supporting Arizona educators and schools as they transition to using high-quality, openly licensed educational materials. With this initiative, Arizona joins an initial group of states making a commitment to move away from traditional, expensive textbooks in favor of freely accessible educational materials.

“Making available free and open education resources can help reduce financial strain on schools and districts while encouraging digital awareness,” said Superintendent Douglas. “GoOpen materials will provide locally elected school board members with another option as they carefully consider the selection of appropriate curricula for their students.”

The U.S. Department of Education is coordinating the statewide #GoOpen initiatives through its Office of Educational Technology. The office’s director, Joseph South, explains, “With the launch of statewide #GoOpen initiatives, states are helping districts thoughtfully transition to a new model of learning by facilitating the creation of an open network of digital resources that can increase equity and empower teachers.”

Arizona’s #GoOpen initiative builds on ADE’s existing work to provide a statewide central repository for openly licensed educational materials. The ADE Content Management System (CMS) was launched in 2015 and is already an important part of Arizona education infrastructure. This system reflects ADE’s work with the Council of Chief State School Officers to establish common vocabulary, definitions and formats to describe learning resources through the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI)   and Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), making Arizona’s CMS compatible with the national Learning Registry.

All materials uploaded via the website also automatically fall under a Creative Commons license, making them free and available for use by any educator in Arizona.

For more information about the nationwide #GoOpen initiative, visit the Open Education page on the Office of Educational Technology website at http://tech.ed.gov/open-education/.

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