Hi All
One thing that I have wanted to do for years is to put together some sort of community-based educational resource similar to open-source communities for scripting, etc.
The idea is to establish projects that users (preferably teachers and others who could be considered experts...or thereabouts...) could work on to provide the best instructional material anywhere for particular subjects. This could apply worldwide, and the range of subjects could be limitless - business, languages, history, sciences, welding, you name it.... It's teachers that this is exactly targeted towards. The overall concept is to help teachers by providing a giant resource of information, suggestions, user critiques, etc., to help make the best classroom situation around. The idea would not be to replace or override teachers, but to help them by allowing them to be the biggest contributors to the content...
For example, let's say that you wanted to teach geometry to 9th graders. (I'm using a U.S. school example.) Okay, now, what the OpenEducation.com community could do is, for example:
1. Establish all of the topics that possibly could be covered in this class
2. Determine which topics are more important (sort of like a pecking order I guess) so that time considerations and student tracks could be considered in creating a curriculum
3. Flesh out the best way to teach all of the topics, including variants in how to explain different things, provide examples, etc.
4. Create all sorts of tests that teachers could use. These tests could be subject to community criticism, variations, etc.
5. Discuss different student issues like differing learning capabilities, other factors, etc.
5. Establish a recommended grading system for particular tests
6. Perhaps provide suggestions for research projects to help with literacy issues, writing, etc.
7. Other stuff that I'm not thinking of "write" now ... :-)
There's also the thought of extending this into writing admistration programs for schools. This could be a sort of "Run your school using the OE system" kind of system - grades, testing, admin functions, other stuff. You could have informational and administrative resources that would essentially create an all-in-one educational system. In fact, perhaps the admin side of this could add some real energy to the project and give it the oomph that other projects lacked. A school district could simply use the OE system for free (or, as mentioned, with some limited advertising to pay for things), and take care of their admin and informational needs. This could especially apply to poorer districts anywhere in the world.
You get the idea? I think that the results could be amazing, both for the teachers and the students. You could tackle controversial topics, arcane things, and have open forums for suggestions and all sorts of stuff.
Let's face it, education at all levels needs a kick in the pants these days, and this kind of open community approach just might be one way to help out. Judging from all of the experience that I've had in various forums and the whole open-source community, I can imagine really good stuff coming out of this endeavor.
I was thinking that a project like this could possibly be hosted by a major educational institution like Berkeley or Stanford...I dunno. Any ideas?
There are some pretty impressive community and intranet systems out there that could be employed, and my guess is that enough users would be involved that some good programmers would be in there, too, to help with any special customizing that's needed.
Well, whatcha think?
To approach this project, the following domain was reserved:
OpenEducation.com
Frankly, I couldn't believe it was available, but I would be happy to give this domain over to a major institution committed to this project. I guess there could be some small amount of ads run to help pay for the hosting and admin and such.
Anyway, I'd love your thoughts.
Thanks very much
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