Open Educational Resources Initiative online 2015

Open Educational Resources Initiative

 

 Open Educational Resources Initiative online 2015

Open Educational Resources (OER) are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research

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In 2007, the Information Program began to apply its experience working with the Open Access movement to the growing field of OER. Working with the Shuttleworth Foundation, we launched the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in 2008, which first called for public access to publicly funded educational materials. The Declaration offers a strategy for the development of OER through the use of open content licenses, the collaborative development of educational materials and the adoption of open education policies..

Guidelines

The Open Educational Resources Initiative has a full program of work for 2013. We will consider applications from new partners in line with the above stated priorities however please keep in mind that we are only able to fund a limited number of the many applications we receive. If you are considering applying for funding under this initiative, please send a one-page concept paper to informationprogram.grants@opensocietyfoundations.org. The paper should include the following information.

• A brief description of the project goals and planned activities.
• Information about the applicant organization and project partners.
• An idea of how much your project will cost.

We endeavor to respond to applications for funds which meet the criteria specified within two months

Purpose and Priorities

Policy on educational materials is segmented into local education systems and by language, which makes large, scalable solutions difficult. Our strategy focuses on a small number of pilot countries, notably Brazil and Poland, where there is enough grassroots support and investment in such resources to support advocacy for good policy. These countries, together with the U.S. Department of Education, are now helping to initiate pro-OER policy at intergovernmental organizations: for example, the Paris Declaration on OER was adopted by UNESCO in 2012 and encourages UNESCO member states to provide public access to educational materials produced by governments of their member countries.

 

 

 

Open Learning on the rise in USA - Open Education at Tufts University, the United States

OER and Open Learning on the rise in USA

Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be—if it comes at all—remains unclear.

One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet.

That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT’s plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT’s radical idea as official policy—dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses.

“With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan’s agency is working with the Labor Department on the program.

So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here’s what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with  simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to 

individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves.

And it demands open access to everything: “All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, via an online repository for learning materials to be established by the federal government.”

In other words, if a community college in Washington State gets a grant to build an aerospace program for workforce training, it would have to deposit all its digital stuff in an online library. Anybody who wants to use it would be able to download the content, and they would have full legal rights to reuse, revise, remix, or redistribute it, explained Cable Green, director of eLearning and open education at the Washington State 

Board for Community & Technical Colleges. That’s because the government is requiring that all work supported by the grants be made available under what’s known as a “Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License,” which Mr. Green described as “one of the most open content licenses that exists.”

Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School and former White House technology official, wrote that the openness requirement represented “a fundamental and laudable shift in how grants are made in government.”

If all of this discussion of openness and free online courses sounds familiar, it is. The Obama administration outlined a similar great course giveaway in 2009, a $500-million proposal influenced by work done in the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. The online proposal was part of a $12-billion plan to improve community colleges, called the American Graduation Initiative, but that plan collapsed during negotiations over legislation to overhaul student aid and the nation’s health-care system.

The prospect that similar ideas could survive through this Labor Department program thrilled openness advocates like Mr. Green. To save students money on textbooks, his state is working on an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for community and technical colleges. The federal 

money could mean more choices of content that his colleges could review for adoption in their classes.

“That’s a windfall,” he said. “The sheer volume of openly licensed content is going to expand dramatically.”

How dramatically is unclear. Creative Commons fanned excitement online with a blog post headlined, “U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education commit $2-billion to create open educational resources for community colleges and career training.” And Dave Cormier, a proponent of open education based at the 

University of Prince Edward Island, seized on that story to argue that the money “could end the textbook industry as we know it.”

But when The Chronicle forwarded the Creative Commons story to Sara Gast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, she doused a little cold water on all the excitement. “The headline is inaccurate,” she said in an e-mail. “But at this point, as the solicitation phase is just beginning, we don’t know how much of 

Open Education at Tufts University, the United States

Please give a brief overview of the scope of open initiatives at your institution.

 

Tufts University’s leadership in the open educational resources movement includes a broad spectrum of initiatives that span disciplines (health sciences, social sciences and humanities), infrastructure (digital libraries, enterprise platforms), and tools. Starting with the Perseus Digital Library (classics) that began in the 1980’s, and Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK, health sciences) in the 1990’s, Tufts has been at the forefront of developing comprehensive digital resources that benefit scholars, researchers, and students around the globe. Since the early 2000′s, the number of open projects has grown rapidly—now involving over a dozen major initiatives from every Tufts school with hundreds of faculty, student and staff contributors. To serve our diverse global community of users, we have indexed these resources on the Open.Tufts portal for easy reference.

What motivated your institution’s involvement with open education? Why did you get started?

Tufts’ core values support active citizenship and trans-institutional collaboration with our domestic and international partners. Our community’s involvement with open educational resources has been a natural evolution from applying these aspirations.

How would you describe the level of commitment from faculty, students, and administration?

Tufts’ commitment to open academic resources has deep University-wide support, including formal endorsements from:

• Senior leadership, who have also committed core financial support
• University Committee on Teaching and Faculty Development (standing committee since 1994 with representatives from all Tufts schools, including many academic deans)
• University Library Council (directors from all our libraries, including Digital Collections and Archives and its open access Digital Library)
• Scholarly Communications Team (provides ongoing open access education to the Tufts community, including National Science Foundation data management)
• Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) Steering Committee
• Tufts Technology Services

In addition, we have been a Charter and sustaining member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), where Associate Provost Mary Lee serves on the Board of Directors. Tufts just completed a pilot Provost Open Access Fund that supports faculty manuscript submissions to journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Active discussions are underway on lessons learned and how to move forward to continue to support faculty in open publishing.

In what ways has open education impacted institutional practice, reputation and/or culture?

Tufts’ open educational initiatives contribute to sustaining a culture and structure that enables and fosters creative collaboration across the university, our local communities, and the world. For example, Tufts has been developing TUSK, Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, for 16 years. In April 2012, having shared the code with other schools under a no-cost evaluation license for many years, we released Open TUSK to GitHub, at http://opentusk.org. A growing number of schools in the USA, Africa and India are using TUSK at individual schools, at multiple schools within an institution, or at institutions across a network. For instance, several East African institutions are using TUSK to share educational competencies and content across their entire region. Challenges related to managing an open source software require a steep learning curve such as learning how to manage open code, keeping the open version updated, developing virtualized and cloud-based environments, and supporting schools that ask for help. The opportunities afforded by creating a community of developers are large. TUSK has been internationalized so that it can be used in our partner French Congo institutions, and can be translated precisely into any other language. East African institutions can share pandemic training content across the region, while still customizing locally.

Perseus, a trailblazer in the digital humanities, provides dynamic open content and tools that enable learners, including undergraduates, to contribute to scholarship on primary resources in the classics.

Our Scholarly Communications Team provides essential education to our faculty about copyright, open access, open publishing, and related issues.

The Tufts Digital Library is our university’s Fedora-based digital repository that continues to evolve within the developing repository landscape. Originally developed to support access and use of special collections held by Digital Collections and Archives, the TDL is transforming into an open institutional repository that can accommodate publications, research data, and unique collections as it becomes a shared service to support all of the University’s libraries and collecting units.

Many organizations and institutions are developing large spatial data repositories. Discovering and accessing these data sets pose many challenges. As a result, Tufts is leading an effort along with Harvard, MIT and others to collaboratively develop an open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from disparate sources, called the Open Geoportal. It is comprised of several universities and organizations and makes thousands of geospatial data layers available through a single open source interface.

What motivates you to continue?

Four foundational values at Tufts–knowledge, inclusion, innovation, and impact– are directly tied to Tufts’ development and sharing of our open educational resources.

Knowledge results from the core of our work—research and teaching—that Tufts has always been committed to share. Inclusion speaks to the diversity of local and global voices that we engage in our work. The thirst for innovation motivates everything we do, while impact is a major measure of the value and effectiveness of our work. Using an open framework significantly enhances each of these values by engaging a global audience that both uses and contributes to our work.

Most of our open initiatives have evolved naturally from faculty’s scholarly work, and “openness” in turn has expanded that scholarly work in innovative directions. The University provides support, but the faculty provides the substance. The result is that Open Access is now woven into the fabric at Tufts.

What are the most positive outcomes from your institution’s involvement with open initiatives?

We’ve developed a very rich environment for faculty and students to work within that involves partners around the globe. Open Access goes beyond sharing information: it stimulates and enables collaboration and innovation around new methods to organize, personalize, and contribute to the explosion of information our students, educators, and researchers face.

In your assessment, what were some of the most significant challenges your institution had to overcome regarding your involvement with open education?

• Education of faculty, including around intellectual property rights
• We have a “travelling team” to integrate education into departmental meetings and university events to raise awareness and point to resources.
• Funding mechanisms
• We identified core university resources, but external funds remain a challenge.
• Providing sufficient infrastructure support for faculty
• This is linked to funding. Core infrastructure is there, but as awareness and demand grow, we need to be able to scale.

If you had to describe open education at your institution in 5 words, what would they be?

• faculty-driven
• innovative
• collaborative
• inclusive
• impactful

Top 10 Real Life Open Education Success Stories new 2015

Top 10 Real-Life Open Education Success Stories

It’s been more than a decade since MIT shook the education world to its core by announcing it would publish most of its course materials to the Internet for free usage by anyone and everyone in the world. Today there is almost no limit to what a person with an Internet connection can learn. Although hard data is scarce because the environment is still developing, there are many personal stories surfacing of people whose lives have been changed for the better thanks to open education.

1. Mark Halberstadt, USA:

   
   What began as the brainchild of one educator has become a worldwide phenomenon, providing more than 150 million free educational lessons to date to people like Mark Halberstadt. Having earned a music degree in 2007, Halberstadt later decided he wanted to become an electrical engineer. The problem was he had “never gotten above a B+ in math.” So over the course of three years, he used the materials posted on the Khan Academy website to learn trigonometry, calculus, and basic math principles he needed to brush up on. After his first year at Temple in 2010, he had a 4.0 GPA, which he credits entirely to the unique and instructive format of Khan Academy.

2. Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges, Haiti:

   
   Entrepreneurs Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges “wanted to create a small revolution in the way of conducting business in Haiti.” Their idea was to outfit the country with solar-powered streetlights. When they discovered a need for some training in electrical engineering, Noel turned to MIT’s OCW website. The knowledge he gained there helped them launch their small business and ultimately bring light to streets in all 10 provinces of Haiti, some of which had never before been artificially lit. In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, the business is back to work, providing much-needed employment to 18 technicians and light to thousands of citizens.

3. Juan Eduardo Leal Lara, Mexico:

   
   After his father instilled in him a love of engineering at the tender age of 8, Juan Eduardo Leal Lara found himself surfing the Internet for help with his college courses. After finding MIT OpenCourseWare, he kept coming back to study the materials posted there to enhance what he was learning in class at Tecnologico de Monterrey. Ultimately, first-year students at Lara’s university have also benefited from the open education material. Lara helped start a program for students to create projects and practice what they’ve learned, and he based all the material on MIT OCW knowledge.

4. Robin Neal and Darren Kuropatwa, USA:

   
   In 2006, Canadian calculus teacher Darren Kuropatwa posted on his blog about having students build a wiki solution manual together. He found that the collaborative nature of wikis appealed to girls, while the element of a race to solve certain problems interested the boys. At a conference three years later, English teacher Robin Neal of Beaver Country Day School in Brookline, MA ran into Kuropatwa and explained to him that Kuropatwa’s informative blog post had inspired him to create his own wiki to educate his students on the poetry of Keats.

5. Tim Lauer, USA:

   
   Open education success stories are not always grand in scope, or even from recent years, for that matter. In this video, elementary school teacher Tim Lauer of Portland shares a story from 1995 about a young student stung on the foot by a bee. After viewing the bee under a microscope, the students put the pictures on their class webpage. One of the emails they received was from a doctor in the state of Arizonawho was a bee expert. He told the class what they had was actually a yellow jacket wasp, not a bee. His email reignited the kids’ desire to know more about bees and wasps, so Mr. Lauer led them through a two-week study on the subject.

6. Kunle Adejumo, Nigeria:

   
   At the time Kunle Adejumo was attending Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, the computer lab did not even have Internet access. What computers it did have were so in demand by the school’s 35,000 students, they could only be secured for 20 minutes a week by students signing up for them. Luckily, Adejumo was able to reach MIT’s OpenCourseWare site from his home computer. Because a metallurgical class he was taking had no notes, he found some review questions online from an MIT course and had his teacher answer them, helping him better understand the material.

   1. .

   2. Jonne, Finland:

      
      Finland high school senior Jonne says that he loves math from the bottom of his “cold, Finnish, Arctic heart,” but he was never good at exams. Using Khan Academy math and physics videos, he has been able to supplement and sometimes even substitute material given to him in class by his teacher who is “sometimes not that good.” The result was grades good enough to get him into the Harvard Class of 2016. During the summer, he plans to study through the algebra, pre-cal, and calculus  courses on the Khan site to prepare for his freshman year.

   3. Delft University of Technology OCW Initiative, Netherlands:

      
      The World Health Organization hopes to cut the percentage of the world’s citizens without sustainable access to clean water in half by 2015. To contribute to this goal, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands stepped up around 2010 and began publishing its water management course materials for free on the Web. Since that time, universities in South Africa, Pretoria, Curacao, Singapore, Indonesia, and other developing countries have accessed the material and enhanced them for utilization in their respective geographic areas. The result is a collective resource of the world’s top water management knowledge that has the potential to improve millions of lives around the world

7. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, USA:

   
   In 2011, a course taught by Norvig and Thrun called “Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” was made freely available. More than 160,000 students in 40 languages took advantage of the course, with 23,000 graduating in 190 countries. Many of them left feedback describing how much the course helped them. Lynda says she joined with her daughter to build the daughter’s resume, and ended up studying for hours each week and loving the material. Home-schooled student Jack learned he could handle a collegiate-level course by taking the class. Pedro says he now wants to have a career in the AI field after he graduates as a result of the free class.

8. Sam, USA:

   
   The beauty of open education is that the instruction moves as slow as the student desires, or in the case of Sam the second-grader, as fast. His father says that Sam is exceptionally bright and was testing at junior high levels, but all his school could do was offer to move him up to third grade. Even a charter school was ill-equipped to handle his needs. Sam’s dad tried teaching him at nights, but it wasn’t a long-term solution. Now that they’ve found Khan Academy, Sam can challenge himself “” soon he’ll finish the calculus class

Getting a Subprime Education in America Registration Energy’s

 Getting a Subprime Education in America Registration Energy’s

Getting a Subprime Education in America

going to college increasingly means heading for the nearest pawn shop or loan shark to hock your valuables. Based on a recent spate of figures, it looks as if we'll soon need to find a replacement term for the “public” in public higher education. After all, the cost of a public college education is rising at a startling clip. Tuitions at four-year universities have gone up by 15% between 2008 and 2010 (and are still on the upswing). Since 2001, in fact, tuition and fees have climbed at a 5.6% rate annually. In some states, it’s far worse. At six Georgia public universities, for instance, costs jumped by more than 40%. In Arizona, California, and Washington, it was 16% to 21% last year alone.  Meanwhile, for the 2011-2012 school year, state funding of higher education nationwide plunged by 7.5%. At the moment, tuition increases at public colleges are almost double those at private ones

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 So this shouldn’t shock you either: according to the Department of Education, school loan defaults have risen for the fifth straight year. “Public school borrowers defaulted at a rate of 8.3%, up from 5.9% just four years ago.” In other words, “public” higher education is on a path toward the grimmest sort of privatization.  Increasingly, if you don't have the money, there's a sign on the door of the local college classroom saying “no access,” which is another way of saying no access to a decent future. In the economic meltdown of 2007-2008, millions of homeowners went “underwater” thanks to subprime mortgages. Now, as TomDispatch associate editor and Mother Jones  reporter Andy Kroll makes clear in his new piece “ Back to $chool ,” in the process of hollowing itself out and crippling its future, this country is hell-bent on producing subprime educations as well

It shouldn’t surprise you, then, to discover that “public” education is increasingly becoming a very private nightmare. A recent analysis by the Pew Research Center found that student debt is soaring, with a record 22.4 million American households -- nearly one in five -- carrying it. In 2010, the average debt burden of those households was $26,682 (“more than double the share two decades earlier”) and 10% of them owed more than $61,894. Though this debt burden falls on every sector of society, perhaps this won’t surprise you either that the poorest and youngest households are in the worst trouble. Student debt is eating up nearly a quarter of their household income. As the Pew study puts it , “[T]he relative burden of student loan debt is greatest for households in the bottom fifth of the income spectrum, even though members of such households are less likely than those in other groups to attend college in the first place.”

 

Registration Open For Department Of Energy’s National Science Bowl

Registration Open For Department Of Energy’s National Science Bowl

Teams of high school and middle school students across the country can now register to compete in the 24th annual Department of Energy’s National Science Bowl. Thousands of students compete in the contest annually; it has grown into one of the largest academic math and science competitions in the country.

The top two high school teams nationwide win educational adventure trips; the top middle and high school teams win money for their schools’ science departments.

During the regional and national competitions, students participate in a fast-paced verbal forum to solve technical problems and answer questions from all branches of science and math. Each team is composed of four or five students and a teacher who serves as a coach. Teams can find sample questions on the National Science Bowl website to prepare for the competitions.

The winning team from each qualifying regional competition will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to compete in the National Finals held in Washington, D.C., from April 24 to April 28, 2014. The national events include several days of science activities, sightseeing, and competitions. As part of the National Finals, middle school students design and race lithium ion-battery-powered model cars. High school students compete in team science challenges in addition to participating in the academic competition.

“Participating in the National Science Bowl both regionally and at the national championships encourages student involvement in math and science activities, which is of importance to the Department of Energy and the nation,” said Patricia M. Dehmer, acting director of the DOE Office of Science, which manages the National Science Bowl and sponsors the NSB finals competition. “These students represent our nation’s future science leaders. We wish them success in their efforts to reach the National Finals in Washington, D.C.”

Teams of students can sign up to participate in the competition by registering with the coordinator for their local competition. Visit the National Science Bowl website at http://science.energy.gov/wdts/nsb/ to find each local coordinator. Separate competitions are held for high school and middle school. Regional competitions for each area typically last one or two days and take place throughout the country between January and March.
The prizes for the top two high school teams for the 2014 NSB will be announced at a later date. Last year, about 14,000 high school and middle school students from 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico competed.

Education and Social Mobility in Latin America United States

 Education and Social Mobility in Latin America United States

Latin America has witnessed an important expansion in educational coverage over the last two decades. On average, enrollment rates in primary (net) and secondary education (gross) increased from 85.9 percent and 49.6 percent in 1980 to around 94.0 percent and 89.7 percent in 2011, respectively. Many countries in the region are on track to meet or have already attained the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in this dimension. Furthermore, this increase in educational coverage has been identified as an important driver of the observed reduction in earning inequality in the region (López-Calva and Lustig 2010), at a time when income inequality is rising within many developed and developing countries all over the world (see OECD 2011a and 2011b).

Despite this important progress, many challenges remain. In this note, I highlight two interrelated issues: 1) intergenerational mobility continues to be low; and 2) the quality of education is low, with significant differences across social classes in the opportunities of accessing high-quality education. Next, I will briefly discuss the empirical evidence relevant to each issue and outline some policies that could address these challenges.

Low intergenerational Educational Mobility

Social mobility is a multidimensional concept. Economists (e.g., Solon 1992) have traditionally focused on intergenerational income mobility, i.e., the link between a person’s permanent income level and that of his or her parents, based on the stream of income a person or household receives stripped of short-term fluctuations. Yet it is clear that other dimensions such as social status, often related to type of job or level of formal education, are also relevant. (For an interesting case study of Chile,see Torche 2005.) In what follows, I focus on educational mobility in terms of how parental education and family background affect educational attainment and achievement. This focus has an important practical advantage: relatively good-quality and comparable data for these variables are available for a significant number of countries in Latin America.

Several studies have addressed the issue of how family background affects educational outcomes of the next generation in Latin America. Behrman, Gaviria, and Székely (2001) present several alternative measures of educational and social mobility in Latin America and find that intergenerational mobility is much lower in Latin America compared to the United States. This finding is also confirmed by Daude (2011; 2012) and Gaviria (2007), considering the correlation between parental and child education outcomes using alternative data sources. Furthermore, in terms of correlation—that is, how much of the variation in the child’s education is explained by the variation in parental education—there are no significant changes over time (Daude 2011). In addition, a

study of a large number of developing countries also shows that Latin American countries rank poorly compared to other regions in terms of these measures of intergenerational mobility in education (Hertz et al. 2007). However, other studies find a recent improvement in mobility using alternative measures (Conconi et al. 2008). For example, they find that the importance of family background in explaining the “schooling gap”—defined as the difference between the years of education completed and the hypothetical years the child should have completed in the absence of repeating grades or dropping out—for children currently of compulsory enrollment age has declined between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s in several Latin American countries. In particular, they rely on a Fields decomposition (1996, 2003) proposed by Andersen (2001) that takes into account the household’s income per capita and the highest level of education between the mother and the father. However, these measures of mobility do not take into account differences in the quality of education, which are large in Latin America.

Low Quality of Education

Considering education achievement measures such as the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, Latin American education systems tend to score poorly on two dimensions. First, the average achievement in terms of testable knowledge is low. For example, while on average within the OECD less than 20 percent of 14- to 15-year-old students do not reach a minimum level of  reading comprehension, in Latin America it is almost 50 percent. Second, the relationship between performance and aocioeconomic background is much stronger in Latin America than in the OECD (Figure 1). This shows that external circumstances—such as the household’s income level, parental education, gender, or geographical location—are key to student performance (Brunori, Ferreira, and Peragine 2013). In part, the lower levels of average achievement are due to a composition effect: as more poor students

with lower performance reach higher levels of schooling and stay for more time within the system (expanding coverage), in the short run performance falls. Some countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have shown significant improvements over the past decade in reducing the importance of family background in educational achievement outcomes. However, problems in terms of performance and inequality of opportunities are still prevalent. (See also Ferreira et al. 2012 regarding the evolution of social mobility and inequality of opportunities in Latin America.)Another interesting empirical fact from the PISA surveys is related to the social mix within schools. If one decomposes the variation in the index of socioeconomic status indicator and separates variation between and within schools, some OECD school systems (such as Finland) show that most of the variance comes from within schools, while for Latin America most of the variance is between schools. This means that schools in Latin America are socioeconomically very omogeneous. The poor go to the same schools asthe poor, while the rich gather only with the rich. Interestingly, the aggregate evidence shows that there is no trade-off between having socially mixed education systems and attaining high levels of educational achievement (OECD 2010a). Thus, education systems in the region continue to be an instrument for reproducing the current social order rather than a way to facilitate social mobility and opportunities for the poor

United States Certification Program education online

United States Certification Program education online

The Teach For America Interim Certification Program is a state-approved alternative route to certification and is open only to teachers accepted by Teach For America (TFA), placed in TFA’s Detroit region, and who pass the appropriate Michigan Test for Teacher Certification (MTTC) tests.

Entry to this program begins with an application toTeach for America. During the application and interview process with TFA, applicants will be able to indicate their preference for working in the Detroit region. TFA is generally a two-year program; during their service, corps members who don't hold teacher certification are required to participate in a professional education program. Members of the TFA-Detroit corps who do not already hold State of Michigan teaching certification and who choose the University of Michigan School of Education as their university partner are automatically invited to enroll in the Teach For America Interim Certification Program at the University of Michigan School of Education. In this program, students are provided with content methods seminars, field instruction, and job-embedded professional growth experiences to prepare and support their induction as teachers.

Those who choose to pursue provisional certification in the State of Michigan, must

1. Successfully complete the interim certification program.

2. Complete a third year of successful teaching in their placement.

3. Participate in four field-instruction visits and receive satisfactory ratings.

4. Compile a portfolio of evidence of successful teaching, including an employment verification letter; satisfactory performance evaluations from supervisor, a letter of recommendation from a supervisor or mentor; and the Individualized Development Plan required of all new teachers in the State of Michigan.  

Over the course of the two-year program, corps members work toward a pre-identified and sequenced set of instructional skills aimed at their ability to demonstrate specific program outcomes which have been aligned to national and State of Michigan standards for the preparation of teachers, as well as to Teach for America’s Teaching As Leadership framework. 

To support the corps members as they develop as novice teachers, the program engages them in a number of practice-based learning experiences. Corps members are expected to exhibit professionalism in their attendance and participation in these experiences in accordance with School of Education and TFA–Detroit’s policies and expectations:

• Biweekly content methods seminars (approximately 17 class meetings per year)

• Field instruction visits (4 per year) using the program rubric with written feedback provided to corps members, as well as face-to-face debriefings.

Assessment

Corps members’ successful demonstration of these skills is evaluated through field instruction visits, as well as a professional learning profile (PLP) that corps members compile. In consultation with U-M instructors, corps members design a plan for proceeding through the PLP and gather artifacts, such as videos of their teaching and sample student work with feedback. These artifacts are submitted to a personal electronic portfolio and evaluated.

Non-candidate for Degree (NCFD) Option

TFA-Detroit corps members enrolled in the certification program may also apply to the Rackham Graduate School as non-candidates for degree (NCFD)and earn credit for certification-program coursework. This application does not require candidates to take the GRE. Corps members elect two or three of the following courses for graduate credit, for a total of 5-8 credits:

EDUC 490 Content-Methods Seminar (3 credits) Receive credit for bi-weekly seminar

EDUC 638 Field Instruction (3 credits) Receive credit for field instruction and successful field ratings

EDUC 655 Professional Portfolio (2 credits) Receive credit for e-portfolio completion and participation in portfolio exhibition

Master's Program Option

The University of Michigan has also developed a master’s degree program based on our existing Educational Studies program. Corps members electing this option matriculate in cohorted courses along the program’s Urban Pedagogy pathway, further enhancing their understanding and abilities as skillful teachers. Classes are cohorted and occur in the evenings or on Saturdays at the Ann Arbor campus or at the University of Michigan Detroit Center to accommodate corps members’ regular work schedules in Detroit-area schools. They are also scheduled so as not to conflict with required certification program courses, which are a legislated mandate for those teaching under an interim certification.