| I am starting by working on a pilot project[1] to put control of education standards back in the hands of educators. It's inspired by ideas that are quite familiar to the hacker crowd, but quite new to education: continuous improvement, forking, and open source. The main problems this project addresses, and how it addresses them: First problem: Most education standards are written by an external standards body, over which educators have little or no influence. Solution: Make it easy for educators to develop, maintain, and share sets of standards that they create and modify. Second problem: It is difficult for a successful school to share its overall system with another school. Solution: Make it easy for one school to fork another school's system. Third problem: Most schools have one set of graduation requirements, regardless of the fact that students have widely varying interests, aptitudes, and experiences. Solution: Allow the creation of different "pathways" through the curriculum that students can follow to earn a diploma. Fourth problem: Many ed-tech offerings these days are built more with a profit motive in mind than with the desire to foster widespread adoption of what is best for students. Solution: Commit to a fully free and open set of tools for educators and learners. It's a pilot project just for my school this year, but it is public and the source is available for anyone interested. It is also set up to be scaleable as soon as the pilot phase is over. [1] http://opencompetencies.org https://github.com/openlearningtools/opencompetencies/ |