The Situation: Teachers and professors spend hours putting together elaborate syllabi for their classes. Rather than constructing more sophisticated and engaging lectures, they must spend valuable time reinventing the wheel – or reading list in this case – in isolation. Though some may claim unique ownership of their syllabi, all teachers draw on knowledge they acquired as students. Instead of opacity, why don’t scholars opt for openness and share their syllabi and other notes online so that other educators might benefit from and add value to them for the benefit of curious minds everywhere.
The Product: What if there was a shared online database specifically for teachers and professors to post their syllabi and other academic work online? There is already a website like this for secondary education (betterlesson.com). Though successful, it only caters to the K-12 context. Instead there should be a website where distinguished faculty down to aspiring young scholars can share the knowledge they have assembled. What if everyone could access Louis Menand’s syllabus on Cold War Culture or Marjorie Garber’s favorite bibliography of Shakespearean theory.
Next Steps: While MITx, Stanford Online, and Sal Khan have broadcast their knowledge beyond the ivory tower, the next innovation in online education is helping everyone teach each other within and without the classroom. To do that best, we all need a common online database to upload and share each other’s academic work. Call it peer-to-peer review or just a good idea, but I want every scholar to have his or her own open courseware repository in the cloud.
Caveat: Though I often encourage others to steal my ideas, this one is a little different. Since my own social entrepreneurship has been oriented toward open education for the last five years, I suppose it would be disingenuous to beg someone else to steal this particular idea – though if you want to, I may even want to help. In the meantime, I will be working on the replacement to Cliff’s Notes and SparkNotes with a little project we are calling, KarmaNotes.org (stay tuned for more).