This article explores the impact that Open Educational Resources (OER) can have on eliminating the “Education Divide.” Advances in information technologies have created unique opportunities for the free exchange and access to knowledge on a global scale. To this end, a growing number of education organizations and foundations are finding that an open source approach can bridge the educational content gap.
Open Source Curriculum (OSC), which refers to instructional resources and is based on the open source software model, empowers educators to freely exchange ideas and leads to the development of best practices and exemplary curricula. Curriki, an online community for creating and sharing open source primary and secondary education curricula and instructional resources, is a pioneer in applying an open source approach to classroom content and curricula development. Drawing on the social network model, Curriki is advancing a collaborative culture of learning, creating and sharing that is paramount to a networked learning environment.
Committed to the idea that access to knowledge is a basic right for every child, Curriki is a “disruptive change” (Christenson & Overdorf, 2000) that is transforming the traditional model of how content is developed, published, distributed and evaluated. The opportunity exists today to build a sustainable community that empowers teachers that want to teach and students that want to learn with high-quality open source educational resources at no cost.

Keywords

accessibility · collaboration · curriculum · learning network · model · online · open source software · K-12