With new textbooks averaging about $100 each, the cost of new curriculum adoptions for the Lawrence school district can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Next semester, the school district will pilot a new approach: using a combination of free, openly licensed educational resources instead.

In addition to diversifying class content, the money saved by using open resources can be used to support students elsewhere, said Lawrence schools Superintendent Rick Doll.

“We could spend that on hiring more teachers, providing more resources for students, additional programs to meet the needs of kids — all of those things that we’ve cut in the last six years,” Doll said. “We have plenty of priorities where we could spend that money.”

For the Lawrence district — which has about 10,500 K-12 students and another 1,200 in its virtual school — curriculum adoptions for the elementary level range from $500,000 to $750,000, and between $50,000 to $100,000 for the middle and high school levels, said Angelique Nedved, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. For instance, the district’s new elementary reading curriculum for this school year cost about $750,000, she said.

The district’s plan to create a pilot course with only open resources is part of a new U.S. Department of Education campaign, #GoOpen, to encourage states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational materials. The Lawrence school district is one of 10 districts nationwide that have taken up the #GoOpen challenge to replace at least one textbook with open resources within the next year.

“The idea would be that instead of purchasing curriculum and resources, they would gather curriculum and resources from many open, free sources and put that together into a course shell,” Doll explained.

Nedved said the district already has about 20 courses — referred to as course shells or course masters — that use openly licensed resources to some degree. The courses have been in place for about two years and use a combination of licensed and open resources. The #GoOpen pilot course will rely entirely on open resources, and will likely be at the middle or high school level, she said.

Doll traveled by invitation to Washington, D.C., on Thursday to participate in an Open Education Symposium hosted by the USDE and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Educators at the symposium were joined by representatives from education technology companies and nonprofit organizations that have committed to working alongside the 10 districts, according to a U.S. Department of Education news release. The companies and organizations will create new tools to help educators find, adapt, create, and share resources.

The symposium included state and district superintendents and other educators from across the country, and Doll presented about the district’s experience so far in implementing open sources.

“It’s easy to say we should just pull different resources instead of buying them,” Doll said. “But you have to vet them to make sure that they’re good, and then you have to keep it updated.”

Because of the time and expertise needed to create an open resource curriculum, Nedved said the decision as to which course to pilot will be one made in conjunction with both administrators and teachers. The teacher of the pilot course will receive a supplemental contract for the time and effort to put the curriculum together, she said.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced at the symposium that as part of the #GoOpen campaign, the USDE is proposing a new regulation that would require all copyrightable intellectual property created with USDE grant funds to have an open license.

“That is big,” Doll said. “That’s going to open up a lot more resources for schools and universities to use.”