Teachers sometimes find create their own learning objects to meet the needs of their students, or due to lack of resources, or because they can’t find the OER materials that they want to use. The NC Digital Learning Initiative study referenced earlier found that teachers prefer to create their own learning objects (or prefer learning objects created by other teachers) because they believe that the content they create is the content best matched for their students. They also lament the lack of resources and learning objects available to them.

In addition to all of the other challenges that also apply to OER and purchased materials, teacher-created materials face several unique challenges. First and foremost, if teachers have an incorrect understanding of the standards, or the understanding of the standards is unclear within a school, this may not become as readily evident with teacher created materials (third party materials can sometimes yield “clues” that there may be a misalignment, though certainly not always). Secondly, the TCO of teacher-created materials is significantly higher than OER and teachers having to create everything from scratch may burn out easier and face time crunches. Third, at a fundamental level, there is a difference between instructional design and classroom teaching. While many teachers are great instructional designers, not all of them are. While procured materials often face rigorous scrutiny and OER materials are subject to peer review on the Internet, many teacher-created materials exist in a vacuum and are never vetted or reviewed. As an ITF, you can serve as an instructional coach to support teachers in this process.

Increasingly, many challenges around teacher-created materials focus on intellectual property rights. While in higher education, faculty typically maintain at least joint intellectual property rights for their work, there is typically no guidance at the K-12 level. Some may argue that teacher-created lesson plans are created with school resources and on school equipment and are therefore property of the district. Others may argue that teachers are creating the lesson plans, and therefore, the copyright should remain with the teacher. With teachers increasingly moonlighting by selling content on Teachers Pay Teachers and being influencers on Instagram. Many schools are reluctant to tell teachers they can’t earn extra money, but there is concern in some circles that some teachers may be using their teaching job to fuel their side gig. While it’s anecdotal, there are a few documented cases where teachers refused to share content with other teachers, asking them to purchase it from their online store instead.

Some schools are requiring teachers to license all of the content that they create under a Creative Commons license, explicitly in the footer of each activity (some districts are taking this a step further by letting students do the same). Regardless which way a district chooses to go, it is recommended that all districts have a policy about intellectual property of teacher-created material and the right of teachers to share it.

The use of sites like TeachersPayTeachers has become extremely common, with teachers in the DLI evaluation indicating that to be their “go-to source” for instructional materials. A recent study by Polikoff and Dean indicated that a majority of the lessons they studied on TeachersPayTeachers were weakly aligned to standards, were not cognitively demanding, and did not support teaching diverse learners (among many other issues). Additionally, there have been reports of copyright violations on Teachers Pay Teachers as well (a professor at NC State recently found text from a textbook he published in the 70s in a TpT lesson). Amazon’s teacher sharing platform, Amazon Inspire, had to retool shortly after launch because of rampant copyright infringement. Districts and teachers need to be aware of these concerns both when purchasing content from sites like TpT and when selling content, if they choose to do so.