“Today’s ‘best practices’ lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One cite
The way we facilitate learning has not really changed much since the Platonic Academy, but with the help of technology we’re starting to see disruptive ed-tech innovations like the transition from printed materials to digital interactions and the launch of MOOC platforms, both changing the way we think about the future of learning, constantly expanding our horizons and challenging our imagination of what is possible.
The open-learning initiative wants to accelerate and fuel this by developing the technologies and best-practices needed for an open learning platform and then deploy these into production to establish the first community owned and operated open learning ecosystem. An ecosystem like this will provide a place for authors, teachers and students to interact as well as a tried and scalable platform for the next-generation of ed-tech innovations and services to build on.
Open
We are strong believers of open-knowledge and believe a public learning ecosystem should be built on the foundation of it. To us this means:
- open-source: The software that powers learning should be free as in speech and developed in an open and collaborative manner.
- open-communication: The services that powers learning should be available to access and integrate with on an equal basis.
- open-content: Everyone should be free to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute learning content.
- open-data: Data generated as the result of learning should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish.
Transparent and Trustworthy
As with open-source where you can inspect the source of your software and trace its origins we want give actors in the open-learning ecosystem access to the atomic components of the learning experience. By providing independently auditable and tamper proof evidence of learning and tutoring, we create a new trust model founded on the claims based identity of authors, students and teachers. We believe this model is superior to the current one where we trust the issuing institution of a certificate (a university) rather than the individuals who create learning materials (authors) and provide guidance and assessment (teachers).
Libre
To us, it’s important to not only provide a public ecosystem for learning and its technical building blocks, but also to allow anyone to participate in it on their own terms. To allow for this we think the ecosystem must be designed from the ground up to be decentralized and without any central authority. We believe that these are key features that will ultimately provide the ecosystem with more choice of content, teachers and services of better quality at a lower price.
Universal
We believe an open and accessible learning ecosystem is a crucial part of the solution to many of today’s world problems such as poverty and lack of education, so to address this we intend to enable anyone in the world with basic internet access and a passion for learning the ability pursue that passion and earn recognized certification for their work. By doing this we can really change the future of individuals, families and nations for the better by providing them with the fundamental tools needed to participate and compete as equals in a global economy.