The Open High School of Utah Releases Curriculum Under CC BY - Creative Commons
The Open High School of Utah, a public charter, just released ten courses worth of its Web-based curriculum under a Creative Commons CC BY license (meaning others can reuse and “remix” it, provided they cite OHSU when they use its material.)
I browsed their intro-level “Computer Technology” course this morning out of curiosity, which looks pretty good. It’s an interesting mix of basic lessons on using Web-based publishing and online collaboration tools alongside traditional standards-based language arts lessons on topics like writing professional letters, reports, bibliographies, and resumes.
Individual lessons and activities are modular, so the OHSU folk were clearly thinking about how to make their material friendly to others’ mixing and matching.
Kudos to OHSU for its willingness to share its creative work with others. Hopefully other schools will follow suit.
By itself, the OHSU curriculum is a nice resource that hopefully many educators and students will explore.
However, the full potential of OERs to help improve education beyond one school can’t be realized until many other schools follow OHSU’s example and share their own curricula AND data on how students respond to it.
Once a critical mass of K-12 level resources go online and open, the community should also begin collaborating on sharing data on the impact individual open courses and learning modules have on students.
I have mixed feelings about “Common Core” standards, but one possible positive is the potential to start sharing resources and learning analytics on a massive scale to discover “what works” much more quickly, collaborate across district and state boundaries to improve content (think kenkyu jugyo on Internet steroids), and then radically individualize instruction.
OHSU has shown leadership in putting its curriculum out there for all to see — a brave move for a relatively new school. It would be great to see other whole schools quickly follow suit. However, given the PD and infrastructure demands of doing what OHSU has done, this isn’t something that most traditional schools can accomplish overnight.
In the meantime it would be great for individual tech-savvy teachers around the Web to lead locally by putting their own “courseware” online and making it freely sharable by other educators under a creative commons license.
