From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 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.

[edit] Examples

OSC repositories such as Curriki – Global Learning & Education Community, MIT OpenCourseWare 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.

OpenEducator, a non-profit organization launched in March 2006 using the open source Drupal CMS, aims to support an open source curriculum development community for K-12 educators. Another project the Open Source Learning Project is an open source curriculum project initiated by JTG Learning Open Learning Project. This project is focused on a curriculum and training materials for emergency services and developing a resource for emergency services related research.

[edit] Resources

• Futureofthebook.org
• eSchool News Online
• Open Source Software in Education
• GlobalText
• EduCommons
• Creative Commons
• 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
• The Internet Archive