Washington Monthly | Open Educational Resources Haven’t Upended the Way that K-12 Schools Get Course Materials – Yet

"Free, openly licensed course materials, or open educational resources, have transformed a handful of colleges and many more college courses. Students in those classrooms don’t have to pay for once-expensive textbooks. Digital OER are free. Printing costs, when compared to infamous textbooks, are negligible.

In K-12 schools, however, where open educational resources have been hailed as an opportunity to democratize high-quality curriculum and break the publishing oligopoly, OER has had a slower uptake. There’s a lot of buzz around OER in schools and districts, but actual practice hasn’t reached systemic levels."