Technology Companies Partner with SkillsCommons

Become A Leader within the SkillsCommons Community:

Invitation to Technology Companies

SkillsCommons is looking to partner with technology companies to leverage the OER within the SkillsCommons Repository. In doing so, SkillsCommons can:

• Help technology companies connect the community college programs looking for the innovations and capacity building tools technology companies offer
• Collaborate with technology companies to incubate projects that can scale to the greater workforce development ecosystem.

All Opportunities Begin with the INNOVATE Conference

SkillsCommons conducts its annual community meeting at the Online Learning Consortium/MERLOT INNOVATE Conference held in April each year. In addition to supporting the new Workforce Innovation conference track, SkillsCommons provides additional invitation-only sessions. You can meet prospective clients and build relationships.

SkillsCommons will help facilitate and/or broker relationships between its partner institutions/orginizations and technology company representatives. This facilitation will occur through individualized consultation, the online communities in SkillsCommons CONNECT, and e-letters of introduction.

Below are some standard options for participating in the SkillsCommons Community and we are happy to discuss unique collaborative partnership arrangements as well.

Choose Your Option to Participate

BACKGROUND:  The Department of Labor has invested about $2,000,000,000 in community college programs to accelerate and innovate their workforce development programs for job-driven skills within the TAACCCT (Trade Adjustment Assistance for Community Colleges and Career Training) grant program.   The new online and hybrid instructional materials and program support materials are required to have a Creative Commons license (CC BY), be accessible, be interoperable, and be developed with quality assurance processes including evaluations by industry subject matter experts.

SkillsCommons was designed and managed by the California State University and its MERLOT program for the U.S. Department of Labor’s TAACCCT Repository for the Open Educational Resources (OER) under a 4 year cooperative agreement. The CSU-MERLOT strategy was to develop SkillsCommons.org services to:

• Capture and preserve instructional and program support materials produced and/or used by TAACCCT grantees to deliver their innovative workforce development programs.
• Enable discovery of the SkillsCommons.org materials, so others can easily reuse them to accelerate and expand access to workforce development programs.
• Build communities with members from higher education, industries, and local, regional, state, and national organizations to assure the quality and growth in the collection of free, open, reusable, and effective instructional and program support materials.
• Build sustainable organizations and services enabling the longer-term returns on the TAACCCT investments.

SkillsCommons.org continues to work with others contributing to the repository. Anyone can adopt/adapt the workforce training OER for their programs as well and request vendors to reuse and revise the workforce training resources for their goals.

• Reuse is a goal of SkillsCommons
• Reuse will involve a “makeover strategy” for revising OER to meet local needs
• SkillsCommons will enable and facilitate the makeover strategy

Interested but still not sure? Check out the Technology Companies Participating in SkillsCommons Makeovers to learn more.