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OpenLesson Vision

OpenLesson is an open source learning environment focusing on K-12 learning for public schools, private schools, home schoolers, parents, and students. It integrates standard curriculums with lessons, assessments, grades, student work portfolio, and parent notifications. Anyone can contribute content and lessons. The ecosystem should enable a blend of public and private learning apps that plug into OpenLesson services to push lesson assignments to apps and receive assessment results from apps. OpenLesson will provide web user interfaces for administrators, teachers, parents,and students.

Teacher Scenario

Maggie is a 3rd grade teacher in a public school. She goes online to review her curriculum map (a.k.a. pacing guide, syllabus) for next week. Her students are progressing faster than the curriculum map projected so she needs to customize it for her class. The curriculum map is a week-by-week plan of objectives that students should master along with online lessons, assessments, and each student’s personal class/homework portfolio. The curriculum map objectives are mapped to the state’s curriculum which is aligned with state standard end-of-grade tests.

Maggie looks at a matrix of all her students and sees at a glance how each student is progressing on their individual lesson plans. Students who are on-track are highlighted in green, students who are ahead are in blue, and students that haven’t mastered the material for this last week are highlighted in red. She has 4 students in red, so she reviews their portfolios from last week. The system points out that three of the four students are having trouble with multiplication facts for times 7. She assigns them a times 7 lesson to be completed by Tuesday. The lesson is pushed out to each of the three student’s tablets and PCs. When they open their tablet, they will see the assignment. Two of the students have parents that have requested emails when their child needs help. The system automatically notifies the parent via email about the catchup assignment.

Maggie also looks at how her team of 3rd grade teachers are doing. She is mentoring a new teacher and notices that her class is starting to fall a little behind in reading comprehension. She makes a note to bring it up at the weekly 3rd grade PLC (Professional Learning Community) meeting and, together with all the teachers and assistants, come up with the plan to get the class back on track.

Curriculum

• Tied to standard curriculums
  • Common Core State Standards
  • Taxonomy of fine-grained concepts that map to coarse-grained curriculum goals.

Technology

• Backend
  • The system is intended to be a service oriented architecture (SOA) running on a cloud computing platform. The target platform is Google App Engine due to its scalability and low cost of deployment.
  • The target language for the backend is Scala . It’s a modern, scalable, high-productivity language that integrates with a large existing Java ecosystem. It also runs on Google App Engine.
  • AMQP bus services? I don’t see one for Google App Engine.
• Native User Interface
  • HTML5, AJAX, jQuery
  • AJAX transport should be json or XML.
• Third party apps can integrate with OpenLesson services. Open source and closed source apps are welcome.