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Open High School of Utah
Posted on | October 31, 2008 | 1 Comment
Education today isn’t too different than it was 50 years ago. One teacher, a bunch of kids, instruction divided up by subject, standard curriculum across a large population, etc. It has done wonderful things for children and society, but it isn’t doing enough to prepare kids for the world today. I’ve got way too much to say about this to fit it in today, but rest assured, there’s more to come.
Because I feel this way, I get excited when I see promising new experiments in education. One that recently caught my eye is the Open High School of Utah. In their words:
What is the Open High School of Utah?
The Open High School of Utah is an online public charter high school, offering an incredible curriculum, personalized learning experiences, and the flexibility of studying from your home or wherever else you may be. And because the Open High School of Utah is a public high school, there’s no cost to Utah students to attend.
OK, that sounds nice but a little vague. Here some more information from Phil Windley, a member of OHSU Governing Board:
The open courseware model is one that’s been working for some time at MIT, but as far as I know this is the first high school committed to a complete, accredited, 9-12 grade education on open source course content. It’s not as easy as I assumed when the idea was first put to me. There are some gaps to close.
A key aspect of the model is that with open course content, the content can be modified based on data about what works and what doesn’t. With licensed content (and there are several sources for that), you can’t modify it because of copyright issues. And you certainly can’t redistribute the updates.
I don’t know if OHSU is the answer to the problems facing American education, but I love the fact that they’re trying. Utah has fairly high educational standards, but due to large families and lower female workforce participation, their per-student fundig is among the lowest in the nation. Hopefully this experiement will allow Utah to deliver high quality education at a low cost to a large number of students. And even more hopefully the model will be successful enough to spread to other areas.
Phil has a tag for it on his blog, and so does David Wiley, also on the OHSU Governing Board.
OHSU has an RSS feed, a “Friends of OHSU” group on Facebook, and a “Friends of OHSU” group on Google Groups.
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November 4th, 2008 @ 10:54 am
[...] like OHSU, the official blurb leaves something to be desired (unless you’re already familiar with the [...]