Since the open education movement blossomed in the early 2000’s, SERC has engaged with the geoscience education community in developing and disseminating open education resources (OER). The set of websites hosted by the Science Education Resource Center (SERC), with resources from over 120 programs, serve as a touchstone for Earth and ecosystem educators. While there are strong parallels between the movements toward open access seen in that same period within the software and academic research worlds. A robust open education ecosystem can act as a multiplier of our collective ability to effectively teach the next generation. Through this type of system, the efforts of instructors to fashion meaningful activities for their students become visible to their peers, who can in turn adapt and build on these ideas. Ideally, this results in a positive feedback loop, with each instructor able to build on and advance the ideas and practices drawn from the best thinking of the entire community. But while the ability to ‘put my teaching materials online’ is a necessary step, it alone is not sufficient to build a robust open education system. The community also has to attend to the motivators and catalyzing circumstances that will cause instructors to put in the additional effort to make their materials visible beyond their classroom. Furthermore, the impact of the resulting materials depends on how well suited they are for use and adaptation beyond their original context. This factor can be intentionally addressed through approaches such as structured publishing and multi-author development processes, as well as by explicitly attending to issues such as accessibility. Finally, the discoverability of the open education materials is key in driving the feedback loop across the community. We have embarked on user research and the collection of detailed site use analytics to understand how users think about and move through the SERC collections. Informed by these results, we are making broad ranging improvements to discovery across the site. We have also built a new entry path focused on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) with a search interface and other discovery supports that draw from the over 500 DEIJ resources already in our collections. While the creation and use of open education materials is active and thriving, challenges still remain if we want to fully realize its potential as we prepare the next generation of scientists, leaders and citizens.
