A New Way to Think about Educational Content

"Everyone is a student."
"Everyone is a teacher."

                - George Couros keynote at #edtechbc 

Thinking about content differently

We are starting with the idea that there must be a better way of getting the resources we need to write our distance education courses.  We are looking down the road 3 to 5 years and seeing the massive change that is going on around us.  We are starting to realize that the courses we have for students simply do not meet their needs.  Linear, static text plus images webpages are not going to get it done. Different groups of learners are going to start demanding courses that are specifically tailored to their learning needs in a just in time manner. Taking this in account, the current types of learning resources accessible to students and teachers become even more inadequate.  

We need more content, we need content from different sources than are currently  available. We need free content and we need flexible and accessible content.  We need content to be searchable, rank-able and in formats that teachers and students can start working with quickly. We need content that is engaging and grounded in the real world and links directly to the future lives our students are aspiring to.

"We are going to need a bigger boat"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I91DJZKRxs

Where can we find these new types of educational content?  We are starting with the notion there may in fact be life outside of the K-12 bunker and that there may be people and organizations that might help if given the chance. 

We have broken the larger community into five sectors:

1. K - 12 
2. Post Secondary 
3. Industry and Small Business 
4. Community/Not-for-Profit 
5. Government     

We think there are three types of resources within each one of these sectors that we can use:

1. Each sector has within it passionate people who would enjoy sharing with students what they do and help students relate what they are learning about right now to the real world.
2. Each sector has already within it content that is designed for learning that could be modified to teach K-12 students.
3. Each sector generates massive amounts of usable digital content by simply doing what it does.  In theory, we could use this content to create rich learning experiences for our students.  

From theory to practice

These are the ideas that we are basing the EXCITE project on. 

We are starting to bring some mushy and messy ideas to life.

I will share what we have done so far in upcoming posts.

If we can get enough people to believe that everyone is a teacher and that everyone is a student, we might just be able to create something new.

Might be interesting, succeed or fail.

Jason

Jason.wiks@adlc.ca
@adlcprojects