About Us

ISKME is an independent, education nonprofit whose mission is to make learning and knowledge sharing more participatory, equitable, and open. ISKME believes that the development of equitable and inclusive learning environments will contribute to the creation of a more just society.

 

Established in 2002, ISKME conducts social science research, develops research-based innovations, and facilitates innovation that improves knowledge sharing in education. Based in Silicon Valley’s Half Moon Bay, California, ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe, and is well-known for its pioneering open education initiatives. ISKME also assists policy makers, foundations, and education institutions in designing, assessing, and bringing continuous improvement to education policies, programs, and practice. As such, ISKME helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information and create open knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success.

 

ISKME’s theory of action contains three levels of engagement— Study, Open, and Build.

Study

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 50,000 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 info@oercommons.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  info@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.