I started my professional life as a student teacher at James Blair Middle School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Teaching has always been in my blood; I absolutely love learning, which is the other side of the coin. My grandmother was an amazing teacher; you can still buy her textbooks on Amazon. And for the last year and half, I've taught a class in the Johns Hopkins University Graduate School of Communications on digital communications. This semester, I'm teaching the class entirely online, remotely, with no face-to-face meetings.
What's interesting is how long it has taken open-source models to move to the educational space. MIT has put the syllabus for almost every single class they teach online in an open, accessible format - it's called MIT Open Course Ware (OCW), and they've made more than 1,700 MIT course available. But for most of these course, you still have to buy the books - and ideally listen to the lectures. Still, it's a major leap forward and more than 200 other universities world-wide (including Johns Hopkins) have followed MIT's lead. One of the most astonishing projects is England's Open University, where there are more than 180,000 enrolled students - including more than 25,000 students from outside the UK. Their "Open Learn" site is probably one of the most advanced online open educational resource out there.
Looking around the web, the open educational resources available out there appear to be growing by leaps and bounds. The OER Grapevine maintains a "neutral" list of OER projects online, and there are a number of interesting and notable projects, like the California Open Source Textbook Project. The COSTP has a project with Wikipedia to create a history curriculum for 9th graders that is based on California State Curriculum Standards.
The tools for sharing educational resources online continue to emerge. EduCommons is an open source courseware management system pioneered and maintained by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University. And while EduCommons is designed to manage catalogs of courses, Moodle is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate actual online learning through the creation of online learning communities.
Yahoo! has just launched a new online site design to help teachers "create, modify, and share standards-based curriculum". Maggie Mason describes it:
You can drag and drop any element of a web page while you're researching, then search for other people's lesson plans by grade, subject, and state standards. You can even locate nearby teachers who have to teach around the same local events (Chinese New Year in San Francisco, for example). It shows you top-rated, most recent, and most copied lesson plans, and lets you build a network of teachers whose work you trust.
But despite all of this activity, there isn't much in the way of open educational resources for middle school teachers, let alone primary school students. I'm a big believer in the One Laptop Per Child project - give the world's children laptops, and let them learn about learning and teach each other. Unlock their potential through technology. But for laptops to be useful resources inside of the world's educational systems, we need affordable - even open - educational resources, like digital textbooks. Reviewing what's out there, it seems that there is a vacuum of original, high-quality content for primary school children, and an even greater absence of basic educational curricula sourced from the developing world. That's one reason I've signed on to help get the Open Learning Exchange started - we need more - and better - open online educational resources for kids.
