Last week, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation held its annual OER Grantees Meeting at Yale University. Several OCW Consortium members were represented there to learn about Hewlett’s plans for moving forward in the arena of Open Educational Resources. An added bonus was the word coming from Hal Plotkin (Senior Policy Advisor to Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter in the United States Department of Education), who announced that the Obama Administration will be relying on the Hewlett Foundation as a formal advisor in the creation of structure for US Department of Education grant programs moving forward.

Those plans involve a portfolio focus shifting towards projects that foster “deeper learning.” For Hewlett, deeper learning means increasing economic success and civic engagement by educating students for a changing world and addressing a crisis in schools marked both by the sacrifice of depth for the sake of breadth and by an ever-widening achievement gap. Hewlett’s approach will be two-fold:

For K through Community College

The K through Community College arena remains an under-developed area in the US, given its huge potential for OER deployment. Aiming for the 2017 re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Hewlett will engage the process for developing state-based standards and will enter the federal competition for new assessment processes. In the meantime, Hewlett will focus its advocacy efforts on creating the conditions necessary for change in 2017, including removal of barriers currently blocking the incorporation of open textbooks and curricula.

In order to achieve scale, Hewlett is looking to develop proof points that can be shown to policy makers as evidence that open educational resources really do help achieve deeper learning. OER Research thus will continue to be a funding priority. In addition, Hewlett will be promoting model schools that feature not only the consumption of open resources but the embrace of open pedagogies such as remix and peer-to-peer learning.

Policy change that is unaccompanied by changes in capacity and practice will almost certainly lead to system failures. Mindful of this, Hewlett seeks to fund projects that develop curriculum, tools and training for delivering OER to children and young adults. Partnerships between Hewlett and the open source community will be a significant part of this process.

For Higher Education

Nor is Higher Education being left out of this deeper learning picture. While recognizing that structural differences between Higher Education and K through Community College will prevent direct replication of successful Higher Ed. strategies, Hewlett looks to the Higher Education community for support in areas such as research and staff development.

Additionally, Higher Education continues to contribute to the overall health of the OER movement simply by managing to thrive in this tight economic environment. To capitalize on that contribution, Hewlett will be supporting ongoing policy development in Higher Education that will enable OER to move from the margins of the Higher Education arena to the mainstream. Improvement of communication methods, and particularly the articulation of agreement on core issues, will be the focus of Hewlett’s ongoing strategy of support for Higher Education.

There is great excitement among the Hewlett staff and the OER community about where we are headed together.