This month’s Resource Highlight was contributed by April Pforts, State Supervisor of Mathematics for the Iowa Department of Education. 

Last August, some courses were made freely available online for Iowa teachers in K-12 across the state to access. Over the last year, Iowa K-12 teachers have been developing high quality courses that are aligned to the Iowa standards and can be used in a variety of ways. Now, we are sharing a new site which will be used to host and share courses developed by our teachers.

Course repository, resource library and exchange

We are on track for a summer launch of the new Iowa e-Learning Central website that will replace the existing e-Learning Central Google site for hosting newly developed courses in a course repository. This new site will include an updated resource library and student/course exchange to facilitate the sharing of online courses across districts.

In preparation for the launch and the availability of newly developed course content for the 2020-21 school year, we will retire the courses that are currently available for download or listed within the Iowa e-Learning Central Canvas Commons Consortium on July 1. Schools that have already downloaded and are using these courses can continue to do so, although there will be no additional updates or support provided.

New and additional content

New content (units and courses) for the 2021-22 school year will focus on core subjects for grades 9-12 (English/language arts, mathematics, science and social studies), as well as computer science and financial literacy. This content is free for all districts and schools to download and use within their local learning management system (LMS), such as Canvas or other systems specifically designed to create, distribute and manage the delivery of educational content.

Additional content developed by Iowa educators will be released during the 2021-22 school year across additional subjects and disciplines, including the career and technical education service areas.

To support you as you plan for next year’s curriculum, we will share detailed course descriptions in the next few weeks and look forward to a full launch this summer.

 More information

You can refer to our Iowa e-Learning Central fact sheet for more information. If you have questions about using Iowa e-Learning Central in the fall, please contact Gwen Nagel at gwen.nagel@iowa.gov. Technical questions can be directed to ilcsupport@iowa.gov.

Note:

While there are OER included in the collections featured here, some materials are free to access but not open. Still, Iowa e-Learning Central is a powerful and useful tool for K-12 instructors to share and find free resources to support their courses.