Material Detail

This is a great opportunity and resource for Faculty Developers, Instructional/Learning Designers, faculty, and anyone else interested in the design, development, and delivery of open source lesson plans for adult learners. Designers for Learning (EIN: 47-1639401) is organized as a nonprofit corporation in the State of Illinois, and operates exclusively for charitable purposes in accordance with section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Designers for Learning provides educational resources and service-learning experiences designed to promote literacy, including the ability to read and write, as well as the knowledge and skills related to a specified subject or field. It promotes service-learning opportunities through collaboration with students, volunteers, schools, and other social enterprises.

Designers for Learning was founded with an aim to provide instructional design support to underserved social needs and they have devoted 100% of their focus since incorporation exclusively to helping adults with low literacy and math skills. Their service-learning projects to support adult basic education have included both small and large-scale projects to crowdsource the creation of free open educational resources (OER) for adults with low literacy and math skills. While their focus has been on instructional support for adult literacy, they look forward to expanding their reach to other literacy initiatives. The website offers over half a dozen open educational MOOCs focusing on instructional design and evaluation. Most of the resources offered on this site are CC licensed and free though there are a couple on-going events that require a nominal, small fee.

Service-Learning Focus

Over 4,000 people have enrolled in the 100% virtual service projects to learn about adult basic education needs and to help build a repository of free lesson plans and OER for adult educators and their students that are aligned to the College and Career Readiness Standards (see the Adult Learning Zone on OER Commons). In exchange for volunteering in the service-learning projects, participants gain real-world experience, as well as support from subject matter experts in the field of education. The aim is to align the service-learning projects with the academic and experiential learning needs of the volunteers. To that end, Designers for Learning works with professors and other student advisors as partners to find ways to incorporate the service-learning projects with a student’s course, internship, or practicum requirements. Find out about how to involve your students or how to become a volunteer mentor.

This will delete the comment from the database. This operation is not reversible. Are you sure you want to do it?

Thank you for reporting a broken "Go to Material" link in MERLOT to help us maintain a collection of valuable learning materials.

If you feel this material is inappropriate for the MERLOT Collection, please click SEND REPORT, and the MERLOT Team will investigate. Thank you!

You are being taken to the material on another site. This will open a new window.

Do not show me this again