A colleague of yours tells you they are ditching the textbook and are about to go all OER (Open Education Resource). What would you say to them?
The first piece of advice I would have for anyone asking my advice on this topic is to go to someone who knows more about it! It was clear to me from one evening's reviews of OERs that the quality varies enormously, not just from one site to another, but also from one subject or grade level to another within a site, or even from one topic to another. Therefore, anything I write here is just a preliminary impression.
LearnZillion seems to me to be completely inadequate as a stand-alone teaching resource and potentially harmful even as a supplement to other teaching materials. It is horribly boring and unclear, but far worse than that, it puts most emphasis on calculation procedures with no chance for students to think out the underlying mathematics, or even reflect on it after having it explained. (Examples: "You just add a zero for times ten," or for decimal division, telling students to multiply the divisor and dividend by the same power of 10 with absolutely nothing on WHY.) Even comments on the mathematics are bungled, such as "When finding a measure of center, such as median or mean, our data is constantly being driven toward the center," with an accompanying graphic showing a circle with arrows pointing into the middle. That doesn't even make sense!
On the other hand, opencurriculum.org looked, for Math 6, like an incredibly valuable, easily searchable resource that could be used to find great, innovative lessons on any Common Core math standard, collecting together lessons from many good resources. (I didn't look at nearly enough lessons to be confident of that, but that was my initial impression.) Even if my impression was right, there would still be issues with standardization: which teachers would use which lessons, and who would decide? Still, it certainly deserves a closer look.
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