In this age of rampant information sharing, why aren’t educational materials as ‘open’ as some other things – like some computer code? This is the question that Scott McNealy, who revolutionized software development with Sun Microsystems, asked himself about instructional materials while he was trying to find a way to explain electricity to one of his school-aged sons. As he wrestled with this question, he came up with an idea. Why not apply the same collaborative spirit that drives the open source software world to K-12 education material? From that brainstorm, Curriki burst onto the scene. Today we’re one of the largest K-12 open source education sites in the world with more than 85,000 registered members and close to 250,000 “friends of Curriki” on our mailing list. Curriki is used by educators from Boston to Bangalore and in virtually every country around the world. The model of sharing Open Educational Resources (OER) is already fundamentally changing teaching and learning. As technology spreads across the globe through low-cost laptops and even cell phones, open content has the potential to bridge the education divide between those with and without access to high quality instructional materials.
The Curriki site itself offers educators the ability to do three main things: Find free and open source educational resources; Contribute their own classroom-tested curriculum; and Connect with other educators using our group tools to collaboratively develop new content.
Community Power
Educators who are looking for classroom materials can search our repository of more than 30,000 free and open source resources. The content comes from for-profit and non-profit publishers and from our large and growing community of educators. It includes full courses, units of instruction and individual lessons, many with simulations, animations and video. Using Curriki, members can create collections of curricula for use in their classrooms, similar to assembling an iTunes playlist for use at a party or the gym. Teachers build collections of resources that they find in the repository and then can add to them with their own best lessons and units of instruction. If the teacher decides that one way of explaining how to add fractions will be more engaging than another, he or she can simply swap one in for the other. By everyone sharing their best content, all teachers gain access to a wealth of different approaches to all of the most common teaching activities.
With Curriki, the process of sharing is streamlined, so that teachers who want to contribute can use simple templates designed around popular pedagogical styles such as Understanding by Design or Constructivism to create content right on the site. Users can also upload Word, PowerPoint or virtually any other kind of file. Some districts are now using the site as a tool for knowledge management so that when veteran teachers retire, the great content they’ve created over the years doesn’t have to retire with them. Preserving and sharing high quality curriculum: sometimes some of the most powerful ways to improve teaching and learning are also the simplest.
Teacher Collaboration
Teachers who want to collaborate to build new curriculum can come together using the Curriki group tools. This easy-to-use set of tools lets members set up a group around a specific area of focus. For example, the Parlin School uses Curriki to share curriculum and then invites other schools and teachers to collaborate around their contributions. The group can start with content that’s found in the repository and then add to it with their own material, or they can develop everything themselves from scratch.
Quality
Assurance
With any open site, “How do you make sure the content is good?” is one of the first questions people raise. With an equal opportunity system of contributing, a quality vetting process is vital and Curriki’s review process is therefore appropriately thorough. Any content that a member uploads is first reviewed for its educational relevance. Next, a team of experienced subject matter experts review content and provide both numerical scores and detailed analysis for technical completeness, content accuracy and appropriate pedagogy. We also have a Comments feature on every resource, that allows members to post ratings and write comments on what worked and didn’t work in their classrooms. This process allows for input from a community with a lot of opinions – teachers.
Clearly there is an impact from these efforts both in the U. S. and around the world. In just a few years, nearly 1 million lessons have been downloaded from our site. In districts such as San Jose, California and on Long Island, New York, and in Nepal and Indonesia and Yemen, the feedback is that this model of sharing makes obvious sense. We’re just at the beginning of the Open Educational Resource movement, but we need continued funding to keep things rolling. To grow globally, this new, altruistic model of sharing information needs additional supporters. To date, we’ve been generously supported by benefactors, ranging from committed wealthy individuals to foundations. As money gets tighter and tighter, we’re spending an increasing amount of time following up on every lead, from stimulus grants to wealthy high tech execs with Web 2.0 funding techniques.
David vs. Goliath
One such opportunity came from a former Google executive Paul Buchheit, who announced this summer that he was planning to give away “a lot of money” and wanted the community to tell him where to spend it. Groups were asked to post their ideas and then to let the community vote for the ideas they liked best. Through email newsletters and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, Curriki organized our forces and reached out to our entire community – and they responded and continue to vote. Within a few weeks we were competing for the number one spot with the deep-pocketed Clinton Global Initiative. The Chronicle of Philanthropy wrote a story about how Curriki is the David challenging Goliath.
That metaphor resonates on many levels. David as the smaller organization – and David as the upstart new model of information sharing. Questions and challenges still abound. How to motivate teachers to contribute? Will the philanthropic community maintain the necessary support? It’s not a Goliath amount of money, but the question of sustainability is ever-present. Perhaps a community of believers will click Obama-style and donate in small increments. The model is being honed as it’s being invented.
This new model of leveraging the collective knowledge of the community is beginning to deliver on its promise of revolutionizing learning. The challenge is how to make it sustainable.
Follow Dr. Barbara Kurshan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bkurshan
