Curriki.org to receive UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize

• © UNESCO/Michel Ravassard
• Barbara Kurshan at UNESCO

Curriki, the Global Education and Learning Community (USA) is a comprehensive internet portal, tool set and user service designed to develop, aggregate, evaluate and support the best open source curricula for all age groups and learning interests worldwide. It was awarded this year’s UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education on 19 December at the Organization. Barbara Kurshan, Curriki’s Washington-based executive director, presents the recently-created platform in this interview.

What are Curriki’s objectives?

Our major objective is to eliminate the education divide through the sharing of knowledge. Scott McNealy, the founder of Curriki, believes that knowledge shouldn’t be proprietary; our goal is to be the free open resource for distributing and sharing content and curriculum. Like the cell phone that changed communication, I believe that Curriki is a leap frog technology: we are trying to come up with a new model for teaching and learning.

When I started this job - I’m an educator, and a computer scientist - I asked myself how open is open for education? This is determined by each country, and it changes daily. The second question is: can you build curriculum collaboratively? Instructional design is very top down, controlled by a process and pedagogy. We impart the instructional materials to teachers, particularly in third- world countries. We want content to be structured, and we want teachers to organize it day by day. For example, in India, UNESCO came to us and asked us to build 150 lesson plans in science so that on any day, if a teacher is absent, his substitute can teach the subject. The third question is can you trust the community? We have always trusted the department or the Ministry of Education. Today, we are asking people to trust the teacher and his students to correct curricula.

Are you not targeting precisely those populations that don’t have access to a computer?

We are targeting all populations. In western nations like Canada, the US, France and England, people want to share the content they created, they think it’s good and valuable. We are trying to service everybody: share information and use it.

Access, however, is an issue. People like Nicolas Negroponte with his One Laptop Per Child project, Craig Burton from Classmate, Sun with their Sun rays are helping us. I’m not worried about access but policies must make access available.

How do you account for cultural differences?

If a country wants to use content, it can change and adapt it. I met with the Minister of Education in Rwanda and she sees Curriki as a way to build capacity around instructional design by using bits and pieces to create their own content, adapted to their country, with our tools. Retrofitting old content to a new model is harder than using the new model to build new content.

How can you ensure quality of content?

We ensure quality through the Curriki review system (CRS). At the first level, we make sure content is not pornographic or subversive. A technological system flags every piece of content that is uploaded as reviewed or not reviewed. We also have people at this level: for example if the word breast comes up, and you only use the machine, it would be removed and with it anything on breast cancer, which is not what we want. At the second level, we have expert teachers to review the curriculum and make comments, the same way they would review a text book lesson. The third level is a very high level expert review by university professors. However we don’t take out content we don’t agree with or evaluate the lesson plan as good or as bad. We assume the open source community will correct whatever it doesn’t like.

Curriki was set up by a group of educators. But don’t teachers see it as threatening?

There are two kinds of knowledge spaces: linear and random. Teachers used to start on page one and go to page 360. Today, students and younger teachers are coming into a random knowledge space, are used to multi-task and to getting their knowledge from different people. They bring a different mind-set into the class room and they are actually very excited about what we are doing. One of our potential funders believes that if teachers are involved in building the knowledge, they will be more engaged, their students will be more engaged and better-engaged students do better. There is a one to one correspondence between engagement and achievement.

Curriki has lots of levels of engagement. In Indonesia, we were invited by the Ministry of Education to help with capacity-building for teacher quality and train 15 of its administrators. Our local partner ended up training 75 teachers from all over the country.

How can you control quality when it is in a different language?
Do you make guidelines available? Is there a Curriki brand?

Communities in different countries take responsibility for doing that; we give them the infrastructure. If a country is interested, it will contribute funds and staff at the ministry level for implementation. We are building this repository of content but we’re also building a social network, Curriki is a community-building project, it takes on all of the aspects of a You-tube or a Wikipedia community. The community makes its own regulations, evolves its own way. If you trust the community, content is corrected within minutes after it put up.


Any plans for the future?

We plan to improve our technology to make it easier to use. Also, to encourage teachers to build and contribute curriculum, we are running a very large grant process, giving grants to teachers around the world.
Up to date, our content has addressed the 12 years of schooling, but we will soon release a new project from the Sesame workshop on our platform for preschool children with videos, lesson plans and materials.
Curriki is a transformative idea, an opportunity to have a significant impact on education.

• Source:UNESCOPRESS
• 19-12-2007