itslearning, an award-winning learning management system (LMS) developer announced a strategic development in its partnership with Gooru, a nonprofit organization that curates and vets open educational resources (OERs). For the first time in the K-12 market, educators can now access complete online curricula for more than 35 teacher-curated courses in core subject areas, including science, mathematics, English language arts and social studies.

The availability of courses is the most recent development of the two organizations’ strategic alliance, first announced May 2016. The first phase of the company’s joint development resulted in a seamless integration of 1.7 million of Gooru’s high-quality resources and 14,000 collections (organized sets of resources) within the itslearning platform. Tagged with quality metadata, these resources provide a vast embedded library of discoverable resources for immediate use in lesson plan. Now, a range of core courses across subject areas, each containing resources, collections, and assessments, offers educators an additional advantage.

“With all this high-quality, vetted, and standards-aligned content readily available directly within our LMS, itslearning is truly a single hub for curriculum and instruction,” said Arne Bergby, CEO of itslearning. “This vast library allows districts to reduce their reliance on expensive publisher content. In addition, itslearning allows curriculum leaders and teachers to remix and customize content collections and courses to meet the personalized instruction needs of individual students and the performance objectives of entire districts.”

Courses offer educators tremendous flexibility. They can be copied and customized to support diverse student needs and varied instructional models such as blended learning or project-based learning. Each course provides educators with content and assessments organized into units and lessons to easily share with students.

“Our two organizations are the first to create such an offer for students and educators,” said Dr. Prasad Ram, CEO of Gooru. “These teacher-curated courses have been vetted and reviewed for quality. And, as with all of our resources, they are aimed at guiding all students toward positive learning outcomes rather than focusing on certifications, specific state accreditations or summative assessments. ”

The extensive amount of resources pales to other LMS offerings.  With itslearning, educators can tap into learning objects, such as websites, interactives, educational games, questions, digital text, and videos, that have been curated and organized from over 500 sources, such as PBS, Smithsonian, NBC Learn, NASA, National Geographic, and Algebra Lab. Resources span language arts, math, social sciences, science, world languages, visual and performing arts, career technical education, health and physical education, personal finance and 21st-century skills.

“We believe the Gooru content in the itslearning library will allow our teachers to quickly find high quality content for their students,” said Michele Eaton, Director of Virtual & Blended Learning for the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township. “Currently, too much time is wasted sifting through endless pages of Google results or various social networks to find just the right content. With a few simple clicks in the itslearning library, our teachers can filter down to some of the best educational content on the web. That content can then be easily transferred to the students. Our teachers save time and find better materials because of the growing number of resources in the LMS library.”