Kickstarter is a fantastic resource for crowd-sourcing fundraising, but why doesn’t it have a category for education? Online crowd-funding is a great way to raise money. For instance, the Obama campaign famously raised over $750 million in 21 months, with 80% of donations under $200, meaning that most of the money was contributed by small donors online. But why haven’t we tried to harness that power to create more free and open educational resources?
Some websites, like Donorschoose.org, have set up pathways for donors to give money directly to the classroom, with small purchases of books or supplies or underwriting field trips. While this kind of resource is vital to helping struggling teachers, it’s only for K-12 and it ultimately only helps those individual classrooms.
There should be a Kickstarter for Open Educational Resources, or KickstartOER.org as I like to call it, that would help create even more new and inspiring learning resources. Khan Academy and Stanford’s AI course are amazing, not because of how much knowledge one man was able to broadcast to the world but because on man set a precedent for other amateur and professional teachers to duplicate. Now it is our turn to replicate share their their process in similar or other innovative ways.
Sites like Curriki.org prove that teachers are willing to share their resources with each other. Now all we need is to allow the crowd to provide a financial incentive through crowd-funded patronage to create the best possible free and open lessons in every academic subject. Even a small amount of money would help construct a vast network of educational content and creators. Best of all, like a candle igniting others, this knowledge would only proliferate and illuminate curious minds everywhere.