Open: A tool for teachers to create and share lessons with their students (opens in new tab)

This could be awesome.

I'm not sure I like the idea of lessons being electronic in a systemic way. (When I worked on Elgg, originally an elearning app, I declared that I'd stop immediately if I thought people would use it to replace face-to-face lessons.) Nonetheless, this is going to have a lot of very positive real-world applications. Kudos also for a very simple, friendly design.

Here's what I don't like: the use of the word Open for a centralized service that presumably has a commercial business model. Open education is a generic term for a kind of learning where barriers to entry are reduced as much as possible. Think OpenCourseWare, the Open University, etc. The name for this service feels like it's trying to co-opt and take advantage of that movement, even if that isn't actually a motive here. Education is a very emotive area, and a public good, so a lot of people feel it's best suited for free and open source software. Your work is cut out for you to justify yourselves being a commercial enterprise that stores lesson content from teachers, and I'd suggest that calling yourselves Open is not a good first step.

Finally, this became a running joke with Elgg, so I gotta ask you: are you SCORM compliant?

Using a single very common word is horrible and will confuse people [0]. If they insist on using the word 'Open', I suggest capitalising it to 'OPEN' maybe?

I welcome cheaper education tools. However there doesn't seem to be anything 'open' about this. No open source code commitment, use is 'free' and students appear to need permission from the teacher to enroll. It seems that they should rename themselves to Online instead.

[0] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Open

I wish them the best, but there is no information on the website.

There's not even a video of what the tool is like. If it requires digital tablets to use, does it only run on windows, or the ipad, or android...

And as rameshnid points out, most teachers don't have the free time, the inclination, or possibly the skill to create their own multimedia-based lessons and homework activities from scratch.

Ultimately I think, many educational innovators are forgetting the fundamental problems with education - only 30% of students who go through the process end up proficient in reading, math, and science. And even many of those who are proficient end up not learning much at all in college and have serious misconceptions. They don't really learn until thrown into the world later on. See for example the opening of the video Minds of Our Own, where Harvard & MIT graduates given a battery, bulb, and wire can't even make the bulb light: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html Or Jerome Epstein's work, which found a significant percentage of college students only had an 8th grade or even 4th grade level of understanding of math.

Overcoming these and other misconceptions involves more constructivist and interactive techniques that lectures and flashcards and drill & kill software don't address.

I spent some time last year working on a similar product here in Mumbai. We had an amazing product, but the challenges here in India were -

1) Teachers don't like to record videos/ make digital teaching aids, unless initiative is from the top.

2) Its difficult to make videos of the quality of Khan Academy, not every one can teach like Khan

3) Its additional work load on already underpaid teachers

So these things got me thinking-

- Can you incentivize creation of high quality lectures? Maybe raise donations and pay teachers who create the best content.

Anyway good luck with it. Also let me know incase you want a demo of our effort in case we can collaborate on this. (I don't know if this is appropriate here, please correct me in case its not welcome)

Really like the idea - have been waiting for an application that will allow teachers to become masters of their own digital pedagogical content. However, I'm not a huge fan of the attack on classrooms - perhaps it's a personal opinion, but 'needing improvement' doesn't necessarily mean 'broken', and the statement makes me question the efficacy of a service purporting to be a panacea for all the flaws in a traditional classroom.

horrible name. assuming you do get enough traction with it otherwise, it's going to cause nothing but confusion when talking about. "opens" you to other naming problems in the future if you try to expand the brand to other products Example: the Open Gradebook -- is it open, or is it owned by the Open company -- do you prosecute everyone other website or software with Open in the name? can of worms is "opened". :)

my two cents

I met with these guys a few days before they went to their final Thiel presentation to talk a bit about where we're heading w/ Khan Academy and their brainstorms. @david and @nick, congrats on making the cut!

Super nice, motivated guys. Hope they deliver something cool and push the education envelope.

Watching lectures at home, doing "homework" at school. This makes so much more sense to me than the default way we do it now.

This seems like it could be really useful when paired with "The Gutenberg Method" (http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html), which basically asks students to do the assigned reading at home, along with some type of annotation of "Here's what to look for".

Then, in class the next day, the teacher answers any questions, briefly covers any difficult concepts, and they can spend the rest of the class-time engaging with each other instead of lecturing.

My suspicion (disclaimer: I was, at one point, a teacher) is that if you want people to use this service, you'll have to show how it improves instruction, and you'll have to do so in much more concrete terms than you have here.

That said, if I ever have a classroom of my own again, I can see myself using this tool when appropriate.

Have you guys in any way been inspired by Salman Khan's (khanacademy.org) work? Perhaps a cooperation could benefit both of your organizations, and consequently the rest of the world.

Improving education is always a very laudable goal. And even though I see the value of having many parties to chose from, I think in this case a lot more can be achieved by reducing fragmentation of the available tools and sources and having potentially major players join forces.

This is a cool idea, in principle.

I am generally unconvinced - and have been for a long time - of the efficiency of video lectures. When I was homeschooled, the video-curriculum students (Abeka Video) never seemed to do quite as well as the ones with live instructors.

I am, however, quite enthused about the idea of educational startups, and I certainly hope to be proved utterly wrong!

I'm not sure why all of the other commenters are so negative. This looks amazing! Khan Academy for the local high school... I love it.

I wish that I could have gone to a school where I watch the lectures at home and spend the 74 minutes with the teacher working on problems.

If you want to sell this to teachers, you need to talk about how you will decrease their prep. time. Any hint of increasing prep. time is a show-stopper.

E.g. I do about 2-4 hours of unpaid work for every paid hour in the classroom.

By the way the two founders are 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows.

Using digital tabets -> "Using digital tablets"