CURRIKI:Open Source Educational Resources

Curriki's mission is "to improve education around the world by empowering teachers, students and parents with user-created, open source curricula."

They also want to make sure that people understand that it's all free!

Curriki is where a "community of educators, parents and students can work together to develop interesting, creative and effective educational materials that the global educational community can use for free."

Their goal is to:

Develop curriculum through community contributors
Deliver the curriculum globally
Determine the impact by project and by individual
The initial focus is on K-12 curricula in the areas of mathematics, science, technology, reading and language arts, and languages.

Curriki believes that "access to knowledge and learning tools is a basic right of every child. Our goal is to make curricula and learning resources available to everyone."

Curriki says that it is "based on an open source technology, a Wiki, which makes it easy to post materials online. When community members view the resource pages, they are able to comment, edit, and group together content to create a lesson, course or curriculum."

They plan to have other technologies available in the future, as well. Some of these will include: bulletin boards, blogs and podcasts so as to enable collaboration between contributors and users of the content in order to improve the curricula.

Curriki says that it is a Community that "is comprised of thousands of people who want to create and use high-quality educational resources.

Curriki is a relatively new community and members have already started posting their resources. They plan to soon have "easy to use tools for joining groups to build curricula right on the site." This seems like an excellent way to have collaborative efforts to develop curricula. Individuals with experience in developing general curricula can combine their efforts with individuals who can add their knowledge about culturally specific issues that may be required for a particular community.

Scott McNealy, the founding partner of Curriki says that:
"Access to basic knowledge and learning tools for our children should never be proprietary. In fact, this can and should be a basic right of every child. Yet, over 100 million kids around the world do not have access to these primary education tools. We want to change this. The benefits to providing universal access to an education are endless.

"At Curriki, the sole mission is to educate. By building a world class learning environment that is community developed and supported, and publishing it for free on the Web, Curriki works to ensure that anyone, from anywhere can participate."

Curriki says that it is an "ever-growing collection of free lessons, assessments, resources and textbooks. The resources have all been developed by members of the curriki community". In the near future members of the Curriki Community will be able to comment on and edit the materials they see. Presently, Curriki staff and volunteers are trying to review all the contributed materials. They hope, however, that people who use their site will notify them of any errors that are found.

Curriki also has Partners that are working with them to provide educational resources and tools, funding, research, as well as editorial and educational guidance.

You can read more about Curriki here.