Open Learning ExchangeUniversal Basic Education 2015

Dr. Richard Rowe, President of Open Learning Exchange (OLE), and Larry Direnger, Executive Director of Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) National met in ESR’s Cambridge offices on August 14 to sign an important and far-reaching Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The agreement permits OLE to distribute through the Billion Kids Library all of ESR’s materials on conflict resolution and aggression mediation, which have been used successfully in urban school systems throughout the United States.

Once the materials are in the Library, they will be available for use and adaption by teachers and leaders all around the world.

The agreement also anticipates OLE and ESR working jointly to provide training for OLE centers in Rwanda, Ghana, Haiti, and other locations where conflict and civil turmoil have been a key issue.

Plans are underway to help ESR localize their programs in these international areas through the inclusion of local content and references to local issues. The content of Connected and Respected a nationally respected K-6 curriculum, and ESR’s equally acclaimed Conflict Resolution in the Middle School and Conflict Resolution in the High School will become available to OLE members around the world as a complete K-12 curriculum.

–Joe Rappa

As Open Learning Exchange prepares to test the alpha version of our Library, we are still closely following developments in the Open Education Resource [OER] community at large. The OLE model is an iterative process, and therefore we continually seek to improve the resources OLE provides to its consortium members. The OLE Library team is reassured they accurately anticipated recent shifts in OER online packages, and our work is still on the cutting edge of this exciting new field of educational service. Look for similar feature to these (and more) when the OLE Library launches in the 4th quarter of 2007 ..

Looking around the web, the open educational resources available out there appear to be growing by leaps and bounds. The OER Grapevine maintains a “neutral” list of OER projects online, and there are a number of interesting and notable projects, like the California Open Source Textbook Project. The COSTP has a project with Wikipedia to create a history curriculum for 9th graders that is based on California State Curriculum Standards.

The tools for sharing educational resources online continue to emerge. EduCommons is an open source courseware management system pioneered and maintained by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University. And while EduCommons is designed to manage catalogs of courses, Moodle is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate actual online learning through the creation of online learning communities.

Yahoo! has just launched a new online site design to help teachers “create, modify, and share standards-based curriculum”. Maggie Mason describes it:

You can drag and drop any element of a web page while you’re researching, then search for other people’s lesson plans by grade, subject, and state standards. You can even locate nearby teachers who have to teach around the same local events (Chinese New Year in San Francisco, for example). It shows you top-rated, most recent, and most copied lesson plans, and lets you build a network of teachers whose work you trust.

Yet, with all these announcements, we can’t help thinking some things are still missing from existing OER packages. Clearly, there is a vacuum of original, high-quality content for primary school children, and an even greater absence of basic educational curricula sourced from the developing world - but what else is missing out there? What does the world need? What are you looking for?