Could We Open-Source Education?

Word Press’ Matt Mullenweg feels that over time, open-source software will outperform all competitors (The Knowledge Project Podcast: “Episode 100: Collaboration is Key”).

Open-source resources are developed by anyone who would like to contribute. The resultant software is free to change, improve, understand, distribute and profit from. Word Press (which hosts this website) is an example of an open-source product. Anyone can copy the code that builds the site, profit from it, and most importantly contribute to making it better. Word Press has found alternate ways to be profitable, an example would be selling their anti-spam software or pre-packaged DIY websites. Perhaps the most compelling argument for open-source software is that the people who work to improve it are unlimited, ensuring a variety of diverse perspectives during development. We can extrapolate this philosophy to education. As a teacher I design lessons I think will benefit my students, but it is impossible to incorporate all their perspectives since students are diverse and my own worldviews are limited.

Why can’t parts of education be open-source? Khan Academy founder Salman Khan believed in free education for all, and his videos are hugely valuable. Imagine those videos could be contributed to and tailored to local curricula by local teachers? Content created by many teachers with many perspectives would undoubtedly be superior to content created alone.

Sanjay Sarma from MIT is quoted on EdSurge’s “How the Brain ‘Grasps’ New Concepts” (December 22, 2020) that the tragedy in education is that the one part we could be doing better automated online (direct teaching) is what we are (traditionally) focused on doing in schools. If there was an excellent, open-source, video bank of direct-teaching lessons tailored to local curriculum – we could flip classrooms much more easily. Teachers could focus on the essential parts of education that cannot be done online: fostering curiosity, building community, real-time formative feedback, and developing hands-on skills.