The Billion Kids Library
The central feature of each Open Learning Exchange is the Billion Kids Library: a library that contains open and free basic whole-course educational curricula appropriate for the elementary and secondary school teachers and students of that particular location. These OLE sites may be as small as an open-air classroom, or as large as a nation-state. To help ensure that all library curricula effectively meet the needs of patrons, each item in the Library can be evaluated by member-users – both educators and learners - according to a robust and refined objective standard schema. The OLE evaluation standards balance objective assessment and subjective experience and are further vetted automatically and objectively through a process linked to the characteristics of the members who composed the evaluation. The goal is to allow library patrons to define for themselves what is useful, and then help those patrons find Library content that fits their individual criteria.
The Library is composed of three inter-related parts:
1. Repository of open, basic, whole-course educational curricula
2. Course Development Studio: where the information from the library can be collaboratively disaggregated, re-mixed, and synthesised into new knowledge
3. Archive of OLE organisational documents, critical evidenced-based evaluation, and history
Currently, the pre-release version of the Library is nearing completion. Large scale testing will begin in in the middle of 2008. The launch of the full library suite is anticipated during 2008.
