Difference between revisions of "Education/Compiling the best educational material"

Revision as of 01:14, 23 April 2010

Helping to gather material from people who are exceptional at explaining concepts clearly and interestingly should be a priority. Examples of inspirational explainers might be Alan Watts, Carl Sagan  and David Attenborough , although of course the majority of these people will not necessarily be well known.

It cannot be expected, at least initially, for these people to spontaneously contribute and submit their work to a freely available educational repository, there needs to be a concerted effort to find these people and help them record their material, including perhaps incentivizing their contributions.

Other people have a talent not just verbally explaining but writing, making diagrams, images, animations or interactive games in ways that make it as easy as possible to understand the concepts in question. Again these people should be sought out and encouraged to contribute their knowledge to open content  educational projects so the material can be built upon and offered freely to anyone who wishes to use it.

Alan Kay in his TED talk gave some remarkable examples of the power of good explanations, including a method of teaching differentiation to six-year-olds.

Another way to get good material is to let anyone freely submit their material and the promising parts can be incrementally improved by other editors and contributors until perhaps it reaches a high standard as in the wiki  process. Connexions is an example of using open-source collaboration to create learning materials.

The good material will bubble up to the top, with the help of ratings, recommendations and dynamic testing. One feature of an open-source educational system with large-scale collaboration is the possibility of dynamically testing different explanations so that the most effective can be found. Imagine three different animations have been created to illustrate molecules coming together in a chemical reaction. If these are put into an open-source learning hub, they can each be shown to thousands of users. After seeing the animation, the users are tested on their understanding of the chemical equation. From the results of these tests, the software will be able to know which of the three animations is most effective at explaining the chemical reaction.

Teachers if they wish could then use any of this material where appropriate, and use their own skills to check it has been understood by their students and elaborate further where necessary.