TSTM-SkillBlox

SkillBlox is a free application designed to help teachers locate, organize, and share open educational resources (OER) within collections called “Blox.” These collections can then be shared with learners or other teachers, offering flexible ways to supplement instruction. Based on lessons from prior studies of Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM) implementation, the TSTM-SkillBlox project sought to improve the platform’s usability, curate high-quality OER, and test whether teachers could effectively use SkillBlox to align their instruction with TSTM’s skills and…

The Teaching Skills That Matter–SkillBlox (TSTM-SkillBlox) instructional support pilot was designed to help adult education teachers integrate instruction aligned with the TSTM framework, a U.S. Department of Education initiative supporting learners’ academic and employment goals. At the center of the pilot was SkillBlox, an emerging digital application that enables teachers to find, organize, and share open educational resources aligned to TSTM skills and topics. Teachers also received professional development webinars and ongoing support to apply TSTM…

SkillBlox was envisioned as a free application to help teachers find, organize, and share digital learning resources aligned with the Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM) framework. Rather than serving as a complete curriculum, it was meant to be a flexible lesson design tool, allowing educators to curate high-quality open educational resources into “Blox” of activities they could use directly with learners. The promise of SkillBlox was to make instructional planning more efficient, collaborative, and aligned with evidence-based teaching practices.

This blog is reposted from content previously shared on the TSTM-SkillBlox Research project page by the EdTech Center @ World Education.In the last TSTM-SkillBlox blog, the World Education team described our process for developing new SkillBlox features. Leveraging a design research approach to gather user insights about teaching and learning, our aim has been to create practical tools and advance research that supports skill-aligned instruction through open education resources (OER). Iterative Feature DevelopmentThrough focus group conversations,…

This blog is reposted from content previously shared on the TSTM-SkillBlox Research project page by the EdTech Center @ World Education. The follow-up to this blog, Designing an Application For and With Educators, is also available.World Education is building new features for SkillBlox as part of our partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in IES-funded design and development TSTM-SkillBlox research. Our qualitative approach is guided by Design Based Research (DBR) (Brown, 1992; McKenney & Reeves, 2018; Sandoval, 2014), through which…

Recently, SkillBlox was updated to include over 1,000 new activities in four new subject areas, along with a number of new features designed to ease the process of sharing and adapting SkillBlox created by other users. But what led to these updates over others? In Designing in the Open: Building Free Software, Blox by Blox, the TSTM-SkillBlox team describes the invention and building of the free, open education resource (OER) platform. The team shares early insights gleaned as they’ve worked to build a sustainable, equitable open education ecosystem that…

The TSTM-SkillBlox Instructional Support Pilot is exploring how the TSTM instructional framework, delivered through the SkillBlox online platform, can improve technology-enabled adult skills instruction. We launched the first component of the pilot, an implementation study of TSTM, in Fall of 2021 to explore the needs and experiences of teachers who are aligning their instructional practices with TSTM. We found promising practices and identified obstacles to inform development of SkillBlox that supports TSTM implementation. About the TSTM-SkillBlox…