A non-profit organization that works for the welfare and need for education, OpenCurriculum is a platform that helps numerous people and gives them an opportunity and experience in education. OpenCurriculum is a platform to find thousands of open educational articles, related videos, audio, worksheets, documents, etc. produced and curated by the community. It aims at providing every child with the basic education they deserve.
By providing primary education a sound and beneficial individual can be carved for the society. Therefore, OpenCurriculum focuses on three elements- community, innovation and freedom. According to them these are what enable a high-quality K-12 education.
It is easy to share and access material on OpenCurriculum, not only do they bring resources to the platform themselves, but they make it easier for you to bring and share your resources with your friends and with the world. With the introduction of user profiles and user resources & collections, it has never been easier to create new worksheets, quizzes/tests, and lesson plans. Apart from having highly streamlined interfaces to create / import these materials from scratch, you can now bring in existing content you have from your Drop box, Gmail, Google Drive and 6 other sources. Use collections to organize all these materials, either for your personal or school needs. By bringing in early institutional partners to share on their platform by using easy-to-use workspaces called Projects it makes itself more useful for its users. You can start discovering some of its content from the home page . Projects allow communities to work collaboratively on shared material, and interact with each other in creating better and newer learning content. It also replaces the need for learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle in many cases.
Not only does it have a huge contributing team but OpenCurriculum enables anyone to make moderation and changes to articles already available there. By submitting the changes you can further help in the betterment of the quality of the material. OpenCurriculum fills a gap in accessibility to content and teacher collaboration that many people want, but no one knows how to ask for. OpenCurriculum therefore is opening the gateway to a teacher’s go-to professional tool.
They link each article to related open educational resources from the web. This is extremely useful to teachers and learners alike, as it models their usage patterns in looking for various kinds of content related to a particular topic. While the article will aim to serve as the definitive and canonical “textbook” resource, the related rich resources will extend the capabilities of the article’s text/images to broaden the range of resources one can learn from. This list is ever changing, and is going to depend entirely on user inputs and ratings in the future.
One can notice the focus and presence of search all throughout their usage experience. Search has been an extremely crucial aspect of this release, as it points to their continued commitment to reduce the time it takes to look for exactly the resources you are looking for, and reduce wasted time in the process. So, apart from building a search functionality with rich indexing of content, we are introducing powerful search filters, for high-speed searches and filtering through all resources on the website. As they bring in more content and evolve the search tools further, they make these filters even more versatile with tighter control on what you are looking for.
Hence, OpenCurriculum is an interesting and useful platform that propagates the spread of education at the level it is required the most. K-12 education’s one of the easiest ways of accessing and sharing is here! For more information you can always visit their site for details and queries.
