Ohio has funded an online repository of free
educational resources since 2007. Next year, teachers will have to find the
content themselves after the state legislature elected to stop funding the Distance
Learning Clearinghouse.
Funding was cut in half, to $500,000, last year. The
Ohio State University, Columbus, which operated the clearinghouse, has taken no
position on the elimination of funding, but did prepare a report which estimated
that 82% of the schools in the state had used the resource in some way. The
clearinghouse has more than 12,000 lessons in key subject areas, more than 950
reviews of online courses, and more than 1,000 professional-development lessons
for teachers, according to a report from The Columbus Dispatch that appeared in eSchool News.
“They’ll have to go to Google and try to do their own
reviews,” Janet Herrelko, a math-education professor at the University of
Dayton, said of instructors who previously used the clearinghouse as a
resource. “It will take a lot longer for them to understand it. If you try to
skim this material, you could miss problems with it.”
State
politics may also be involved since a liberal advocacy group has charged the administration
of Gov. John Kasich used the program to steer contracts toward a major Republican
donor. One of the contracts provided an online interface that critics said
didn’t work and that most users bypassed.
