Trades Curriculum and Trades Library
Stay Tuned!
The Campaign is developing open education resources for anyone to use and access freely. This is a long and involved process as we work with Subject Matter Experts and pilot testers to create national standards.
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Why Open Education Resources?
The Campaign is committed to overcoming systemic barriers to historic trades training. This includes access to educational resources for both students and programs.
Programs need instructional curriculum. Designing this, however, is time and resource-intensive. It requires background research, input, and knowledge from Subject Matter Experts, as well as copyrighted or public domain learning materials and demonstrative media, and compliance with Section 508, which outlines the guidelines for making web-based information accessible to individuals with various needs.
These access barriers are a fundamental hurdle in the creation and proliferation of historic trades training. It stymies programs’ abilities to provide instruction, thereby limiting student and public access to this vital information. By creating and sharing these resources, The Campaign aims to help alleviate the burden on individual programs, freeing their time to focus on training the next generation of historic tradespeople.
How do we get there?
The Campaign has a dedicated team to produce historic trades curriculum. We’re accomplishing it through the following steps:
- Copyright all work under a Creative Commons License.
This will allow people to use the curriculum in their programs, protect the content from copyright poaching, and require edits of the content to be licensed the same. Read more about our Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) here. - Make the curriculum compliant with Section 508.
Section 508 is part of the Rehabilitation Act and requires the government to ensure that internet-based resources can be used independently by anyone. For publicly-funded institutions, this is a requirement. For privately-funded institutions, these are best practices to ensure your work is inclusive and accessible. Ensuring compliance requires time and learning about the regulations. By creating a curriculum with these requirements at the forefront, anyone who uses and instructs with the material can meet these best practices and requirements. Read more about Section 508. - Produce curriculum in English and Spanish.
The United States has the second-largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, with over 41 million native Spanish speakers. About half of those speakers (or 8% of the US population) have limited English proficiency. The number of US-based Spanish speakers is expected to triple by the year 2050. Considering that nearly a third of construction workers identify as Hispanic and/or Latinx, bilingual training resources are the only way to move forward in curriculum development. We are working to retroactively translate English resources into Spanish and create new bilingual curricula with our partners at CENCOR. Read more about our work and partnership here. - Create a variety of media resources.
People learn in different ways, and programs have individual needs. As such, we will produce text-based, video, audio, photographs, drawings, and interactive coursework with learning objectives anchoring these resources to our national standards. This will provide the necessary consistency for teaching national standards, as well as offer programs to individuals with specific needs.
There are many ways for individuals, businesses, organizations, and philanthropic groups to support The Campaign. Find out how.