Dreaming

Here is my dream:

A dozen schools join forces to share curriculum created by teachers over the span of an academic year. The curriculum could range from individual lessons to more structured units. They would publish these lessons under an open license (ideally, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike). Teachers from these dozen schools would publish these lessons on a blogging platform that allowed people to subscribe via RSS, and they would tag them according to subject and grade level.

Over the course of a year, these lessons could be aggregated into a central location. Then, over the summer, they could be organized into more structured collections that could begin to resemble textbooks. These textbooks would have soft spots and missing sections. These missing sections could then be targeted via specific outreach, and during the second year, lessons could be collected that filled these gaps. These lessons could then be aggregated into the main lesson repository, and mixed into the existing texts as needed.

Every year, for every class, teachers create original curriculum. Teachers are already doing this work. The missing piece, of course, is the sharing, which happens less frequently.

I think about this when I read about school districts selling publicly-funded curriculum to Pearson. I understand that school districts feel pinched, underfunded, and under pressure to find new revenue sources. However, the shortsightedness of selling this content to Pearson does nothing to provide a sustainable future for the district. If those texts had been released as an open resource, it would have saved countless districts an enormous amount of money.

Over the summer, we will be releasing our code for our Publishing Platform and Aggregation Hub. These tools will be freely available to all to download and use. This work has many applications; one of the ways it can be used is to aggregate, organize, and republish open content. I look forward to the day when teachers are again viewed as content experts, and purchasing a textbook from a company is viewed as an unnecessary, inefficient use of resources.