OLE in 5 years

Imagine a world where kids everywhere can open their laptops, get online, and learn anything. Ultimately, that’s the vision of Ole: accessible learning for everyone.

Ages 5 to 18

Ole’s goal is to serve children and youth. While people of many other ages will likely make use of the resources, the core idea is that kids can substantially drive their own learning based on what is meaningful to them. An important additional goal of Ole is to support the kids’ teachers by providing a base curriculum and opportunities for professional development enabling them to teach effectively the full range of knowledge and skills needed by their students.

Pan-lingual

To reach our goal, educational resources must be available in the languages used by the students and their teachers. This requires a world-wide community that will create and translate original content to, and from, local languages.

Ongoing Quality Improvement

Students and teachers will be able to comment on and rate the educational resources they use so that others will benefit from their experiences. User comments and ratings will be linked with the characteristics of the users. Ahmed, a 7th grader in Zliten, Libya will be able to find a algebra course in Arabic that is the level he is ready to learn. This kind of user feedback will enable the creators of educational resources to continuously improve their materials.

Local development communities

Everything required to build the Ole curriculum libraries is currently out there; amazing teachers the world over are shaping the lives of their students. We need to foster and encourage local efforts to bring their best curricula online. You can imagine an Ole website where the St Anne’s Elementary School of Arlington, Virginia’s 8th grade English Literature curriculum and the Ampang Hilir Secondary School of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s English Literature curriculum are both available to everyone on the net. Creating and encouraging local communities to share their curricula online is a crucial goal of Ole. It will require micro-grants and building online communities with their own incentives to share, and designing online tools that make curriculum-sharing online easier.

Connecting communities

We also imagine a way for communities in one part of the world to support curriculum development work on the other side of the globe. For example, a retired middle school teacher in Florida should be able to give a small micro-grant ($150.00, for example) to encourage a middle school class in Rwanda to create an online curriculum around algebra. Such a teacher might help in the process of developing that curriculum.

Kids teaching kids

Peer-learning, especially across age groups is a powerful and ancient way of learning. Figuring out how to use the internet and collaborative technologies to encourage peer-learning offers great opportunity for Ole. Building processes and mechanism to allow groups of students to collaborate each other will truly change the learning experience. Imagine American students in a high school history class about the Roman Republic interacting online with Italian students in a high school history class in Rome? Or students in Argentina teaching students in Canada about biology? Ole needs to build both the communities, the incentives, and the online tools to encourage this kind of collaboration and peer-learning.

Games

Perhaps the most challenging part of the Ole vision is figuring out how to break curriculum out of a purely text-based experience. Interactive games, especially those requiring multiple players, offer great opportunity as teaching tools. Figuring out how to make games more accessible for use as teaching tools globally is an exciting and difficult task; the solution might lie in some meta-game-creation tools that could be universally available online.

Learning Communities

Ultimately, Ole’s meta-goal is to transform education, building learning communities that are continuously learning about learning, enabling everyone to bring their own talents and passions to their learning and their living. We seek to build and sustain a global community of educators, students, parents, and community leaders all dedicated to improving education and to creating an abundance of teaching and learning resources will lead to sustainable and abundant living on this small planet.



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