Open Learning: Opening Up A Can Of Worms?

The Open University is poised to join the ranks of MIT’s innovative OpenCourseWare and other institutions in adding resources to a growing collection of free, high quality curriculum that anyone can use, revise, or distribute through the Open Content Initiative. I love it! It’s not perfect but it’s a start.

It makes me wonder what might happen if enough parents and community activists decided to stop bothering with the rigmarole of traditional education (i.e., anxiety generated in response to inane standardized testing, ignorance of 21st Century Skills, and a lack of engaged, meaningful learning) and embrace the concept of *gasp* the Open Source Elementary School, the Open Source Middle School, and the Open Source High School. Think about that for just a second. What if all the materials (ideas, curricula, strategies for introducing and exploring) concepts necessary for facilitating a deep and rich understanding of all the concepts essential for functioning in a ecologically, socially, ethically, and intellectually healthy world were available to anyone, anywhere? What if getting an education didn’t necessarily mean going to or through a school? What if the educational process was so intuitive that any citizen could easily connect to information, people, materials, and experiences needed to learn content or skills? What would it take to make something like this happen?

I can envision groups of committed individuals meeting in person or online to collectively agree on what’s absolutely essential for their children to learn to be able to function in today’s world as well as the world that’s coming. I’m sure there’d be heated discussions about what’s important (critical and creative thinking skills?) and what’s so trivial that it can be left to repose in reference materials until called upon for use (i.e., the atomic number of Boron). Maybe, after the participating members of the cognitive community eventually decided upon the concepts to be explored, they would construct a curriculum that genuinely resulted in understanding by design. Wouldn’t that be radical? I wonder if the concept of grades (as in A+, B, C…et cetera) and grade levels would sort of dissolve into quaint memories. I wonder if the “students” involved in an open source school would be any smarter or humane than the ones currently enrolled in “real” schools.

Anyone else interested in imagineering this concept?

Comments

[Meredith Phillips]

Hi there! I like the blog. I realize that I stumbled open a post which is a few years old but I wanted to be sure you know about Curriki.org. Curriki is a global wiki-based repository of open-source educational content. Please join Curriki (it's free) and you can contribute or take whatever you like to or from our growing repository, and find a community of like minded people. Hope you will! Meredith Phillips www.curriki.org