| ||
---|---|---|
Companies Charitable organizations
Writings
Related
| ||
OER Project is a non-profit open educational resources provider co-founded in 2011 by Bill Gates and David Christian. Originally known as Big History Project (BHP), the titular course was intended to enable the global teaching of the subject of Big History, which has been described as "the attempt to understand, in a unified way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity." [1] The company rebranded as OER Project in 2019 and now offers World History Project, Climate Project, and other courses in addition to the original BHP curriculum. [2]
Bill Gates became interested in the topic when he heard "Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity," a 48-lecture course taught by David Christian and published by The Teaching Company. For Gates, "he [Christian] really blew me away. Here's a guy who's read across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences and brought it together in a single framework. It made me wish that I could have taken big history when I was young, because it would have given me a way to think about all of the school work and reading that followed. In particular, it really put the sciences in an interesting historical context and explained how they apply to a lot of contemporary concerns." [3]
After Gates and Christian met to discuss the lectures, the genesis of the Big History Project occurred. [4] They founded the project, and developed a team to achieve their stated goal, "to get Big History taught to as many students around the world as possible". [5]
Big History Project was launched at the 2011 TED conference at Long Beach, California on 2 March 2011. [6] David Christian presented an 18-minute lecture outlining big history and the intention of creating a global online delivery of a classroom-tested course aimed at 9th grade students. His presentation was part of the Bill Gates-curated "Knowledge Revolution" section of the conference.
In 2019, BHP launched a second course, World History Project (WHP), and announced that the organization had rebranded as OER Project to reflect their expanded catalogue. OER Project has subsequently added a variety of history and climate education courses and announced in 2022 that over one million students had accessed its materials during its first decade in operation. [7]
BHP's initial academic advisers were: [8]
Bain and Trevor Getz (San Francisco State University) are OER Project's current academic leads, [9] and the advisory board now comprises more than 20 predominantly US-based academics and educators. [10]
Prior to launch, seven schools were selected for the initial classroom pilot phase of the project. In the United States, San Diego High School of International Studies (California); The Rivers School (Massachusetts); Northville High School (Michigan); Greenhills High School (Michigan) and Lakeside School (Washington) taught Big History Project in the 2011/12 school year. In Australia, Narara Valley High School in New South Wales and Nossal High School in Victoria taught the course in their 2012 school year.
Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.
The Teaching Company, doing business as Wondrium, is a media production company that produces educational, video and audio content in the form of courses, documentaries, series under two content brands - Wondrium and The Great Courses. The company distributes their content globally through a mix of Direct to Consumer models such as their streaming service Wondrium.com and TheGreatCourses.com, as well distribution through third party platforms like Audible, Amazon and Roku.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
John Huppenthal is an American politician who served as Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction from 2011–2015. Prior to being elected Superintendent, Huppenthal served as City Councilman, State Representative, and State Senator. Huppenthal was also a Senior Planning Analyst for Salt River Project.
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and primary and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
Westside High School is the only high school of the Westside Community Schools district of Omaha, Nebraska, United States.
David Gilbert Christian, a historian and scholar of Russian history, has become notable for teaching and promoting the emerging discipline of Big History. In 1989 he began teaching the first course on the topic, examining history from the Big Bang to the present using a multidisciplinary approach with the assistance of scholars in diverse specializations from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Big History frames human history in terms of cosmic, geological, and biological history. Christian is credited with coining the term Big History and he serves as president of the International Big History Association. Christian's best-selling Teaching Company course entitled Big History caught the attention of philanthropist Bill Gates, who is funding Christian's efforts to develop a program to bring the course to secondary-school students worldwide.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.
Robert W. Timberlake is a former American football player who played college football for the University of Michigan Wolverines from 1962 to 1964 and for the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL) in 1965.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.
Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan (U-M). Open.Michigan supports the open access and use of U-M resources for teaching, learning, and research. Open.Michigan promotes open content licensing and supports the reuse, redistribution, and remixing of educational materials for use by others worldwide. Some of the key efforts underway under the Open.Michigan umbrella include U-M’s Open Educational Resources publishing activities, development of software tools that support creating open content, and various open content repositories.
Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Sal Khan. Its goal is creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos. Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. It has produced over 8,000 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects, originally focusing on mathematics and sciences. All resources are available for free to users of the website and application.
Macarthur Adventist College is an independent Seventh-day Adventist co-educational early learning, primary and secondary day school, located in the south-western Sydney suburb of Macquarie Fields, New South Wales, Australia. It is a part of the Seventh-day Adventist education system, the world's second largest Christian school system.
Cynthia Stokes Brown was an American educator-historian.
A massive open online course or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive courses with user forums or social media discussions to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs), as well as immediate feedback to quick quizzes and assignments. MOOCs are a widely researched development in distance education, first introduced in 2008, that emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012, a year called the "Year of the MOOC".
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2002. Located in Half Moon Bay, California, its mission is to make learning and knowledge sharing participatory, equitable, and open.
The California Labor School was an educational organization in San Francisco from 1942 to 1957. Like the contemporary Jefferson School of Social Science and the New York Workers School, it represented the "transformed and upgraded" successors of the "workers schools" of the 1920s and 1930s.
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. OpenStax's first textbook was College Physics, which was published online, in print, and in iBooks in 2012. OpenStax launched OpenStax Tutor Beta in June 2017, adaptive courseware based on cognitive science principles, machine learning, and OpenStax content. However, announced in October 2022 that Tutor was being discontinued.
Craig G. Benjamin is an Australian-American historian who is professor of history in the Frederik J. Meijer Honors College at Grand Valley State University, where he teaches East Asian civilization, big history, ancient Central Asian history, and world history historiography. In 2014 and 2015 he served as president of the World History Association.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP), open educational practices (OEP), and open scholarship that are established nationally and provincially across Canadian K-12 and higher education sectors, and where Canadian based inititatives extend to international collaborations.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: url-status (link)