Virginia Open Education Foundation

Virginia Open Education Foundation (VOEF) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to bringing curriculum and educational content resources to the K-12 students of the Commonwealth of Virginia through open education. It was started and is currently directed by Middlesex County Public Schools Technology Director Mark Burnet.

Stated mission

• The mission of this non-profit organization is to bring curriculum and educational content resources to the students of Virginia. The manner in which this is accomplished will be to assess, fund and deploy materials and content held in creative commons.
• Delivery and collaborative tools and methods would be provided to educational institutions within the Commonwealth. It is not intended that this would supplant or encroach on the mission of other educational organizations, but to foster an interoperable framework for resource users of a license-free learning environment.
• It is the philosophy of this organization to support a service business model using open source content, software and systems. This philosophy extends to support global adoption of the best practices of this model as it supports facets of education.
• Methods and systems proposed by this organization must be reviewed and adopted in a framework of the scientific method.

Virginia Open Textbook Project

VOEF aims to establish a Creative Commons database of educational resources produced by private and public funding and aligned to the Virginia Standards of Learning. These resources would then be used by individual school systems through print on demand technology for paper textbooks and would be accessible online through content management systems.

Burnet advocates that switching to open source content would greatly reduce textbook prices for Virginia and would allow up-to-date content to be generated and distributed quickly. Because the content would be in the creative commons, private schools would have full rights to use the content, and would be able to modify it for their purposes before use. Also, because content would be generated within the state, it could be based on Virginia's own learning standards instead of those from states like Texas and California, which are currently used to produce many of Virginia's textbooks. It is the view of the organization that educational resources and implementation would be greatly improved, giving children better access to content, including, eventually, online access. While the initiative is primarily focused on Virginia, all content would be free for use by anyone around the world.

Legislative efforts

During 2007 VOEF worked with State Delegate Christopher Peace to propose to the House of the General Assembly Joint Resolution 702, which formed an Open Education Resources advisory committee within the Joint Commission on Technology and Science The committee first met in Richmond on June 20, 2007. Members were interested in lowering costs, providing materials to a broader group of learners, and speeding the process of content distribution via electronic delivery and print on demand. Legislative work is ongoing during 2008 by the JCOTS subcommittee on Open Education Resources.

An early priority was to unlock some of the production and procurement processes for school textbooks in both K-12 and higher education. To this end, VOEF submitted a proposal to Peace that culminated in work by the Virginia Department of Education to create Virginia House Bill 137, which redefines textbooks to include all electronic versions and removes restrictions based on durable paper-bound versions. The bill passed unanimously in every vote, and was signed by Governor Tim Kaine on March 7, 2008.

VOEF has introduced two bills to be crafted for the next General Assembly session. The first is a proposal to mandate that all educational materials that are publicly released by the state to have a Creative Commons Share-alike 3.0 license. The second, and most significant, proposal is to authorize a two-year pilot program to create an open content resource center and evaluate the effectiveness of such a system.

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