CK-12 FlexBook 2.0 vs OER Commons

CK-12 FlexBook 2.0 provides customizable digital textbooks for K–12 subjects including science, math, and social studies. Lessons can combine text with PLIX interactives, simulations, adaptive practice, and related learning materials. Adaptive Practice draws questions from a library of more than 150,000 and adjusts selections based on student answers. Teachers can assign lessons, videos, interactives, and practice to whole classes or differentiated groups, then view progress reports. Educators can reorder chapters and edit or add content in customized FlexBooks. The service works in browsers on laptops, desktops, Chromebooks, tablets, and mobile devices, and is listed at free. Standalone Simulations and PLIX Interactives require a tablet-size screen or larger. Users may download PDFs of FlexBooks they create or customize, though interactive content may not render; CK-12-created PDFs are not downloadable. CK-12 says it is still converting all core content to FlexBook 2.0. Listed SSO or LMS partners include Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Kiddom, Clever, and ClassLink.

OER Commons is a free web-based digital library for finding open educational resources and collaborating on their use, evaluation and improvement. It serves K–12 and higher education educators, librarians and homeschooling parents. A free account, priced at free, provides library access, Open Author for creating or publishing resources, groups, collaboration to curate or remix content, and a personal profile for saved resources. Organizations can use Hubs to develop collections, manage content and facilitate conversations. Custom microsites can have their own libraries and domains, tailored metadata and content creation, and analytics dashboards. Open Author includes an accessibility checker, requires alt text for embedded images and automatically captions videos uploaded to a resource. ISKME offers data and API integration services for learning management systems; its tools can receive and provide harvestable content feeds in Dublin Core, IEEE Learning Object Metadata and RSS. ISKME reports completed accessibility audits and another review underway, but authors and users remain responsible for resource accessibility, and many indexed materials are hosted externally. Resources created in legacy Open Author 1 are scheduled for removal on December 31, 2026; Open Author 2 resources are unaffected.