Flexibility is a cornerstone in personalized learning environments. Personalized learning provides flexibility in pace and learning pathways for students to be confident and competent learners. The design of traditional learning materials, such as outdated textbooks and student workbooks, are not intentionally catered to support the needs of diverse learners and typically do not provide flexibility in pace or pathways for students in the classroom. With the rise of technology, teachers can leverage the digital tools and resources to provide various opportunities for students to access flexible educational resources. Teachers can select, design, and organize high-quality resources and instructional materials to support all learners. Teachers do this by employing engaging pedagogies and research-based best practices of instructional design to provide choices in content and learning activities. This allows for multiple learning pathways that allows students with choice for pace of learning and how they demonstrate their mastery of the content.

This transformative approach allows learning to be student centered and focuses on empowering students to gain valuable knowledge based on their different learning styles, diverse backgrounds, and various learning needs. As curators, collecting resources will require intensive preparation because you have to carefully select and determine resources that are valuable and meaningful, but this investment is not just important for today but for the future as well (Lynch, 2018). It is important to create a balanced collection of materials that ensures all students have access to developmentally appropriate content and resources.

What are open educational resources (OER)? Open educational resources (OER) are instructional and learning materials that can be found in the public domain. Public domain materials aren’t protected by copyright, patent or trademark laws. The public owns them rather than a single person, so anyone can use public domain content without needing permission (Bixler, 2021). In a personalized learning environment, educators can adapt the resources to support the needs of their students to make learning more impactful. Open educational resources are significant because open content can increase equity across schools. It gives students the chance to access standards-based resources for learning anywhere (Bixler, 2021). UNESCO believes “universal access to information through high quality education contributes to peace, sustainable social and economic development and intercultural dialogue.” Not only does this work support student voice and choice, but learning will be authentic and culturally responsive.