Following a year of retooling, the Amazon Inspire digital library reopened in public Beta this week.
Offering a familiar, filtered Amazon search/shopping interface, Inspire allows educators to discover, download, curate and share Open Educational Resources (OER).
Over the past year, Amazon Education has been working with groups of educators, including the Maryland State Department of Education and the Indiana Department of Education, to vet content, to align content with state standards and quality indicators, and to ensure compliance with intellectual property guidelines and copyright law.
Why the delay?
The initial June 2016 launch was met with complaints that the site pointed searchers to copyrighted materials–not exclusively to free and openly licensed educational resources. Amazon retreated into a private beta only available to those with a special access code. (I could not get a code.:-()
Okay, but now I am in and I must say, this looks pretty sweet.
Here’s a little tour of Inspire.
Currently, resources in the portal are aligned to the Common Core State Standards for Math and ELA, as well as the Next Generation Science Standards, the Virginia Standards of Learning, and Florida State Standards. Amazon promises to continuously update the list of aligned standards.
A simple box on the opening screen invites open keyword searching or searching within the areas of Math,Science, English/Language Arts, Social Studies, and more: Arts, WorldLanguages, Health & Physical Education, Career & Technical Education.
Basic filters appear in the left bar on the result list following your initial search. Users may filter for: grade level, subjects (which explode into subheadings), content format, and standards.
Clickin
g on See All Filters allows users to narrow their searches by Depth of Knowledge (Level One: Recall; Level Two: Skill/Concept; Level Three: Strategic Thinking; Level Four: Extended Thinking), by Resource Type, by Rating, and by License.
Registered users may add resources to two types of collections:
Private Collections: personal collections only viewable by the user- Public Collections: shared with Amazon Inspire Community.
You may include public collections built by others in your own collections. Users are encouraged to write reviews and assign a star rating of resources they preview or use.
Sample entry
Sample collection
The promised Resource Upload feature will allow educators, administrators, OER providers, institutions, and publishers and others with high-quality, relevant K12 resources to upload and share and to help grow the library. After my registration, a welcome email from the Amazon Education Team emphasized the importance of this function in growing the community:
In the coming weeks, we’ll also be turning on access for you and your colleagues to upload resources that you’ve authored to the Amazon Inspire Beta as well. We’re working to build a thriving community of educators on the Amazon Inspire Beta, and are eager to have you as a part of it. Stay tuned for more details.
Amazon Inspire instructs users to add only content they have themselves created or to which they have rights. The FAQs page explains site policies, including content and copyright guidelines and notes:
We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. It is your responsibility to ensure that your content doesn’t violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights. Just because content is freely available does not mean you are free to copy and share it.
The FAQs page also explains that Inspire supports content associated with the following Creative Commons licenses.
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
The site also offers its own Amazon Inspire Custom License.
While I worry about the potentially confusing explosion of OER silos, I am excited about the potential for this particular portal with its broad reach and its powerful and familiar search interface.
I am also excited about exploring new resource discoveries with classroom teachers and observing the ranking and evaluation system develop as the community grows.
I like that I can create collections and that it is easy to download and share the resources we discover to support local learning needs. But I am creating collections in so many different spaces these days and I wonder if it is possible to upload some of the best of what we discover as records in our OPACs or if I will be able to embed Inspire collections in other spaces, like my LibGuides. It’s very nice that Collections do appear to have durable links but might they also be embedded for face-out shelving?
You will absolutely want to make sure your admins, department chairs and classroom teacher partners are aware of Inspire for September.
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