Open-source curriculum

An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.

Examples

OSC repositories such as Wikiversity,[1] Curriki – Global Learning & Education Community, MIT OpenCourseWare and Connexions are one way in which the concept of open-source curriculum is being explored.[2][3] With these online repositories, a curriculum framework for a particular course is created by an instructional designer or author in conjunction with content experts. Learning objectives are clearly identified, and learning activities and instructional sequences and assessments are developed and offered to support the attainment of the objectives. However, all users (from students to educators) are empowered to add, delete, and modify the learning activities, resources and generally contribute to the learning environment. In short, each user contributes to the repository and is able to select curricula based on individual interests.[1]

The Open Content Curriculum Project was initiated with MediaWiki software in 2005, and offers a standards-based K-12 curriculum that is collaboratively edited, contains teacher- and student-created resources, assessment rubrics, lesson plans, and instructional resources. All 10,500 pages of content, and 4,240 file uploads are Creative Commons licensed, and the system is used daily by the Bering Strait School District, an Alaska school district. The project welcomes use and active contributions by outside teachers, students and other interested parties. There are currently 2,500 registered users in the database.[4]

The Free Technology Academy is a joint initiative of the Free Knowledge Institute and several European universities to provide master-level education on Free Software, Open Standards and related subjects. All FTA course books are openly published under copyleft licenses. Moreover, the FTA partners together with several other institutions have started a Taskforce for the collaborative design of an International Master Programme in Free Software.[5]

The Saylor Foundation is a non-profit organization that produces new open-source educational content and curates existing open resources to support college-level courses. Its course outlines are licensed under a CC-BY license, making those outlines open-source curricula.[6] Saylor has created nearly 241 college courses using open educational resources, making Saylor.org one of the largest currently-available collections of free courses on the web.[7]

Resources
gollark: Well, because I dislike being creepily surveiled. Though I mostly don't go to much effort.
gollark: As far as I know ISPs can't see that you connect to your own LAN.
gollark: You may only ask dishonest questions.
gollark: VPNs prevent ISPs from seeing all this except possibly to some extent #3, but the VPN provider can still see it, and obviously whatever service you connect to has any information sent to it.
gollark: Anyway, with HTTPS being a thing basically everywhere and DNS over HTTPS existing, ISPs can only see:- unencrypted traffic from programs/services which don't use HTTPS or TLS- the *domains* you visit (*not* pages, and definitely not their contents, just domains) - DNS over HTTPS doesn't prevent this because as far as I know it's still in plaintext in HTTPS requestts- metadata about your connection/packets/whatever- also the IPs you visit, but the domains are arguably more useful anyway

References
  1. Norm Friesen, Janet Hopkins. "Wikiversity; or education meets the free culture movement: An ethnographic investigation". First Monday: Peer reviewed journal on the internet. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  2. Paul Stacey. "Foundation Funded OER vs. Tax Payer Funded OER – A Tale of Two Mandates". Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  3. Paul Biba. "Free textbooks from Curriki". TeleRead. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  4. Sara Bernard. "Teachers and Students Create Their Own Curriculum in Alaska". Mind Shift. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  5. http://ftacademy.org/
  6. http://www.saylor.org/
  7. "241 OER Courses with Assessments in Moodle: How Saylor.org has created one of the largest Free and Open Course Initiatives on the web". Moodle News. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
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