Putting the curriculum online

There are plenty of examples of universities putting curricula online -- MIT was the first, but the Open University is doing it along with others. It's still not clear to me who benefits the most from these efforts, but my guess is that potential instructors who might use some of the course materials would be at the top of the list, rather than independent students who might undertake some sort of self-study project.

Andy Carvin writes about the Bellevue School District in Washington's efforts to put their entire K-12 curriculum online, thanks to funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Seattle Times quotes Eric McDowell, math-curriculum developer for Bellevue School District on what the district should be able to do using the Gates Foundation funds:

The site allows teachers to post lesson plans and ideas for each school day, and allows other teachers to rate how well they thought the lesson plans worked, similar to rating a book on Amazon.com, McDowell said.

Students and parents can also access the site and see what is being taught, and even watch video clips of a teacher giving the lesson.

The goal in the next two years is to have other school districts and teachers from across the region, and even the country, clicking on the Web site to look for lesson-plan ideas and to offer their own suggestions, McDowell said.

"Our goal is to turn Curriculum Web into a site as Wikipedia-like as possible," said McDowell, referring to the free, online encyclopedia that allows most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access.

"We literally want every teacher with access to the Web to add their thought, hints, suggestions and reflections in teaching. We hope it becomes this organic thing so that it can become an incredibly rich resource."

This is also the next step in creating a unified curriculum across all of the district's k-12 schools, and to ensure that day-by-day and year-by-year, students are being taught what they need to learn to graduate with the knowledge they need to succeed in college or the work place, McDowell said.

This kind of thing could be a great way to be more responsive to student and parent input, and to share good ideas quickly among teachers, but it could also become a forum where a few vocal people drown out those with good intentions, like the failed LA Times wikitorial experiment. It will be interesting to see how these kinds of efforts play out -- the "We are smarter than Me" wiki-book is another example of collaborative writing, something which, although it sounds great in theory, is not so easy to do, as the Wikipedia experience has shown.