The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), an independent non-profit research institute established in 2002, is a pioneer in knowledge sharing and educational innovation. Dedicated to the study, spread, and strategic use of knowledge management in education, ISKME helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create open knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success. In assisting the K-20 education sector, ISKME also helps philanthropic organizations and government agencies examine and improve their own and their grantees’ processes for continuous improvement, evaluation, and learning. 

ISKME’s theory of action contains three levels of engagement—study, open, and build:

Research fuels the core of ISKME’s work. ISKME brings cutting edge contributions to the field of education with an interdisciplinary team of social scientists. With a focus on data use, open education, and knowledge collaboration, the research team produces new frameworks, models and theories that lead to transformative change in education practice and policy worldwide.

For more information on ISKME’s research and evaluation services, please contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org.

Open

ISKME’s open and distributed knowledge sharing tools accelerate problem-solving and propel change in all facets of education. ISKME creates and facilitates open knowledge networks that support the use of information sharing and collaboration. Their open knowledge networks include the award-winning OER Commons initiative, a community of 25,000 teachers, students, and self-learners that has curated over 32,000 open educational resources, aligning them to standards, evaluating their quality, and sharing them via social networks. 
 

ISKME builds field-facing open knowledge networks that catalyze the growth of communities tackling timely education challenges such as college completion, productivity, and education policy change. ISKME also provides OER tools and support services for integrating the best of OER and knowledge management.

For more information on ISKME’s open knowledge networks, please contact Lisa McLaughlin at lisam@iskme.org.

Build

ISKME builds capacity for large-scale educational change through innovative trainings and professional development workshops, which focus on increasing access, use, and reuse of what really matters to the field of education--data, information, and knowledge.

ISKME’s OER Professional Development program trains teachers how to create and reuse open education content. Additionally, ISKME’s Action Collabs have been used world-wide as a way to facilitate an ideation process focused on creating tangible solutions. Using design-thinking and improvisational methods of cooperation, Action Collabs provide a structure in which design-thinking is used to generate action plans to solve both large and smaller scale challenges.

For more information on Training and Design services, please contact Samantha Wayne at samantha@iskme.org.

Big Ideas Fest

ISKME’s Big Ideas Fest is an extraordinary immersion into collaboration and design that focuses on transformational change in K-20 education. Creative doers and thinkers from diverse areas of education gather to learn from and share with each other. Breaking down silos and empowering champions, Big Ideas Fest places learning at the front and center of all that we do. The participants are inspirational. The work is dynamic. And the results are revolutionary.