Our friends over at CK-12 have made some sleek, blogworthy improvements to their platform. In addition to giving visitors the ability to create and remix open textbooks online (oh, is that all?), now teachers and students can keep materials and discussions in a newly-improved dashboard.

What’s included in this dashboard?

• Like Kirk in his captain’s chair, teachers can pilot (and keep track of) students’ learning as they discover the strange new worlds of STEM fields. This includes setting up timed and un-timed assignments as well as group projects.
• From their own dashboard, students can conduct discussions using the new groups feature and even set aside time for “self-study.” The latter option allows students to use practice assignments.

What’s it to us? We’ve found a lot of use for CK-12’s open educational resources in our courses, where we’ve carefully aligned the texts to our particular learning outcomes. We hope that parents, teachers, and students alike can put our courses to work for them. These improvements to the platform allow for a lot of extension activities and help to add value for our own Saylor.org students. That’s cool, and we just wanted to say so.

For more, see also EdSurge’s CK-12 Goes in for Remixing STEM, where we first got the word.

Image credit: CK-12 Foundation (File:High School Chemistry.pdf, page 61) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons