WASHINGTON, May 15, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Saylor.org, the free education initiative of the Saylor Foundation, announced today the launch of its new K-12 program of open online courses. The academic courses are aligned to the Common Core State Standards and use open educational resources (OER) extensively, making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide.
"People want lessons that are good quality, targeted to the right grade level, that they can trust," said Angelyn Pinter, K-12 Content Development Manager at the Saylor Foundation. "With something like hundreds, or even thousands, of lesson plan databases for teachers, we're here to vet and organize existing content. Saylor.org can become your first go-to for teachers, students, and parents."
The Saylor Foundation is dedicating significant resources to the K-12 program. Pinter leads a team of 18 course designers (who are experienced educators), an editor, and members of a content development team. K-12 courses will undergo the same rigorous vetting and peer review process that Saylor.org developed alongside its existing 280+ college-level and professional courses.
Courses available immediately include:
- ELA11: American Literature
- MATH: Calculus A/B
- MATH: Algebra 1
- MATH: Geometry
- Common Core 101 - a free resource developed by Pinter to give educators "an overview of the Common Core State Standards and points [them] to many of the most comprehensive resources available on these standards."
Additional courses currently in development will cover Mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) from grades 6 through 12, with K-5 courses and additional subjects to follow.
Common Core Implementation and Free Teacher Resources
Saylor.org's K-12 courses use the Common Core standards as a foundation, filling a gap in curricular materials as states and school districts move to implement Common Core assessments. Facing tight budgets, states, districts, and school increasingly seek focused, free and open online resources for K-12 educators and students.
The courses include a great deal of openly-licensed or public domain content, and the framing and instructions are all available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Thus, while the courses are ready for use as-is, they are also widely adaptable to local needs.
For Use in Homeschools, Alternative Classroom Programs, And More
While the Common Core State Standards alignment is particularly attractive to schools, this and other features of the K-12 program will be useful to the homeschool community and others. Clear and complete alignment to the standards allows parents and teachers to plan their use of materials, while the sequenced courses provide a full Math/ELA curriculum out of the box.
Additional courses will become available as soon as they are complete.
About The Saylor Foundation
The Saylor Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to make quality education freely available to all. To this end, we employ experienced professors to build college-level and professional courses from the wealth of material available on the Web. Today, the Foundation's free education initiative at Saylor.org provides nearly 300 free online courses to anyone with an Internet connection.
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