Open Source goes to High School

(music)

(crowd murmuring)

Well, you are witnessing one of the very first orientation

sessions of the Open High School of Utah.

They're meeting the counselor and

checking their schedules.

They're getting their student pictures taken.

They're signing in and doing their forms and

their fees

We've walked them through how to sign into their classes

so that next Monday they'll open up

those computers and have everything

that they need to be able to be successful students

of the Open High School of Utah.

I'm Rachel, and I chose coming to Open High

School because there'd be a lot of flexibility and

a lot of interaction with teachers.

So, it was different from what else was out there

and I thought that it would be a good fit and it is.

So, I started skating when I was eight

and now I just travel for contests.

The best part's been just being able to travel and

skate, without having the hassle of school

and to take it with me.

My older daugher went to it last year and she's

in China this year working in an orphanage and

she was able to take her computer with her and

do her classes in China. So that's awesome.

(music)

Open High School first crept into my mind during a

conversation with a doctoral student of mine who

was involved with the charter movement in Utah.

Essentially, he dared me saying "You're always

doing this great talk about Open Education Resources

and access to education. You should probably

either shut up or put something on the table."

We're actually the first secondary school that we

know of globally that is using and creating their

own open source curriculum. I hired teachers to go

ahead and write the curriculum under the

instruction of our curriculum director. So, the first

thing that they do is just gather content. There is

so much OER out there. Once they have that

gathered, then they go through it and they start

aligning it to the state standards. Then they start

beefing it up, and adding in the screencast, and

we use Skype, ... and Blabberize, and it's like a

foreign language, all of the tech tools that we are

able to use.

The thing that I really like is having it more

interactive, and being able to have math applets

on your thing where they're actually able to play

math games and you're actually able to see things

happening which you couldn't see in a textbook.

With the open source content, you can modify it

and meet your own student's needs. So, when I

found some stuff, I tried it in my class. It didn't work

I threw it out. Tried something else that I

found and it worked. And, so, that's what I love

about open source and not having a textbook is

that "Can't just tear out that chapter in the

textbook," but with open source you can.

And one of the first things a teacher will go to

to look at things is obviously her gradebook.

In a gradebook, you can actually go to individual

assignments. And so, I'm going to take a look at

this test right here. And we can not just look at

grades, but we can look at the scores on individual

questions. And then I can take a look at all these

different items over here to give me more

information to try to decide "Was it a valid

question?" "Do I need to examine the content that

the students learned the question from?" "Do I

need to look at the question and rewrite it?" So all

of these different levels of data and data analysis

are available to our teachers that really aren't

available to a teacher in a brick and mortar, unless

they have a have a program like this that is doing

the math for them.

I love brick and mortar schools. So I'm still, you

know, tha.. another time,but it was alot harder.

We always talked about wanting to make it data-driven.

But it was hard when you're correcting all these

paper tests to be able to go through and actually

analyze each question and what each question

was, whereas here it's at our fingertips.

Here, you know, the kids who need help can come to you,

or you can come to them when you

notice they need help, and they really get that

one-on-one interaction that some students need

and, you know, other students may not need it and

they're just really smart and they can go through

their classes. And that's great. But the kids who

really need it get it and they get a lot more of it

at Open High School.

There are 250 this year, 9th and 10th graders.

Trying to open up an entire curriculum in one fell

swoop would be very difficult. So we did 9th grade

last year, 10th grade this year, and then we build

the curriculum during the school year for the next

year to be rolled out. So, next year we're actually

far enough ahead with our curriculum building that

we'll be adding 11th and 12th grades next year.

There's no reason this model can't be replicated

other places. You know, Moodle is open source,

our curriculum is Creative Commons licensed, and

we're releasing it each year, both in a browsable

way but also as Moodle packages that you can

grab and stick straight into your Moodle. So before

August is over this year, all of our 9th grade

curriculum will available for people to download

and use.

A success and what it should be for public

education across this nation, needs to be that we

have prepared our students to succeed in a 21st

century global economy. Even talking with

businessmen in the technology sector who get

technology, they know it's coming, that it should be

in education, and we'll still hear things like "But I'm

still concerned about socialization. I don't see how

somebody can be in an online school full time, and

have socialization." There's a lot of socialization. It

just looks different. In fact, it looks a lot like what

our kids are involved in outside of the classroom.

Those are the tools that they use. They're already

prepared to utilize them to their fullest. They know

how to collaborate online.

Online education is not just a fad. These tools that

we're using are the exact same that people are

using in the workforce. Our workforce is becoming

very mobile, it's becoming very flexible, and this is

the direction that education is going to be going

and I'm so excited to be a part of Open High

School where we can be on the cutting edge of

bringing this into the K-12 market.

Because it's online, because of our teaching

model, because of all of these great things, we're

able to produce a fabulous open educational

resource curriculum. I can't imagine going back to

copyrighted materials after using open source.

(music)