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
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
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,
Curriki – Global Learning & Education Community,
MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anyw ...
and
Connexions are one way in which the concept of open-source curriculum is being explored. 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.
Th
Open Content Curriculum Projectwas 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
Bering Strait School District (BSSD) is a school district in northwestern Alaska, United States, serving approximately 1,700 students in grades K-12 in fifteen isolated villages. All schools in the district serve students of all ages, and most c ...
, 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.
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
Taskforcefor the collaborative design of an International Master Programme in Free Software.
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. Saylor has created nearly 241 college courses using
open educational resources
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and ...
, making Saylor.org one of the largest currently-available collections of free courses on the web.
[{{cite web, title=241 OER Courses with Assessments in Moodle: How Saylor.org has created one of the largest Free and Open Course Initiatives on the web, publisher= Moodle News, url=http://www.moodlenews.com/2012/250-oer-courses-and-assessments-in-moodle-how-saylor-org-has-created-one-of-the-largest-open-course-initiatives-on-the-web/, access-date = 23 April 2012]
Resources
*Futureofthebook.org
*eSchool News Online
*Open-source software in education
*
Global TextEduCommons*
Creative CommonsFree Technology Academy*
Peeragogy Handbook V1.0 Project
*Free High School Science Textbook project
*UK Innovation/Jorum (Open in UK only)
*
EISTI-
ESSEC – an EU based open courseware repository project with Vivendi involvement – Jean-Hugues Lauret
*
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
*The
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
LAMS CommunityLAMSWikiteachCommon Curriculum- Allows organizations to create curriculum and connect to the teachers using it.
Open Education Consortium*
Open educational practices Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. ...
References
Curricula
Open content