Education/Collaboratively generated educational material
Educational material can be created and edited collaboratively, constantly evolving and increasing in both quantity and quality, similar to the evolution of the famous wikipedia .
Such material is made available free for anyone — teachers or students — to use and customise for their own purposes. This project is in early days, but is very much under way already. Listed below are several sites
- Wiki books
- Wikiversity
- WikiEducator - dedicated to building a complete education curriculum by 2015
- ck12, free, flexible textbooks for the whole American educational syllabus
- Disqo
- Khan Academy, a series of tutorial videos, mostly of science and maths, explaining concepts very well. Includes a testing feature exactly like the one described below. Not collaboratively generated, but released under a Creative Commons license.
- Udacity, from February 2012, offering high-quality, no-cost, univeristy-level courses focused on computer science
- OpenCourseWare such as —
- eToys free and open-source software that teaches ideas in innovative ways. Comes as standard on the XO-Laptop which has been given to over a million children in the Third World
- Open University's Open Learn
- P2P university
- Connexions. Open educational content in hundreds of subjects.
- The material from Connexions is being compiled into complete textbooks for college courses through their initiative OpenStax, sponsored by Rice University. The first set of textbooks are due out in March 2012. According to Richard Baraniuk, the founder of Connexions, "If we capture just 10% of the market with these first five textbooks, an estimated 1 million college students in the United States could save $90 million over the next five years"[1]
- List of educational video websites on Wikipedia
- Open Culture has lists of online courses
- Wolfram Demonstrations Project. Compilation of interactive visualizations of hundreds of phenomena in science, mathematics, music and other areas. Not collaboratively generated, but released under a Creative Commons license, allowing the elements to be used in collaborative projects.
- ShowMe is an app that allows anyone to record and share lessons using a simple interface of voice recording and a touchscreen whiteboard.
- How much can you really learn with a free online education (Wired)
Stanford University are running an experimental new course from October-December 2011. It is an introductory college course in artificial intelligence, led by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun (a leading developer of self-driving cars). The course is available to all free of charge and combines video lectures with online quizzes and assessments. As of August 2011, over 130,000 people have signed up. In the coming years, courses like this are sure become become more interactive and multiply to cover a greater range of subjects.
Video of Salman Khan of Khan Academy and the teachers of the Stanford online AI Class talking about the new kind of education - free, online, lifelong, curiosity-driven, student-directed education.