The Open Curriculum Project
I attended Wikimania 2014 in London, Wikipedia’s annual conference. I was inspired by some of the genuinely amazing people doing some ground breaking work, and decided to see how that could help Egypt’s educational system.
What did I do?
1) Uploaded a scanned copy of the school text books in wiki-commons, which is a part of Wikiepdia for media files and documents.
2) Created a wiki-source “digital library” page which allows the user to edit each page and see the scanned copy side by side., allowing the quality of the material improve over time.
3) A page that details the course and foster a discussion around it.
4) The page can be downloaded as a PDF/EPUB file format meaning it could be read on almost all devices and e-readers while maintaining an up-to-date version of textbook.
This video might help explain:
You may not know this but Egypt’s Ministry of Education (MOE), has all the school books up on a public Microsoft “Drop Box” found here:
I then uploaded the first year secondary school text books to wiki-commons
and tagged them as such check the following link and notice the “Education in Egypt” tag. In fact I tagged the books by Country, Year, Term, Subject and Language (sometimes).
However thats not all I did, and in fact that on its own is not really worth mentioning. Wikipedia has a website, a digital library of sorts called wiki-source, and I created pages for some of these books and linked the scanned books to the digital library pages
The results were quite promising please check the following link.
What wiki-source did was create a page for each physical one in the scanned book, and populated it with text that it gathered by image recognition (OCR).
Putting it all together you end-up with a living document like this: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_1st_year_Secondary_School_1st_Term
What does that mean for the Educational System?
Quite a lot actually, the platform allows teachers, parents, academics, and almost anyone to search, and contribute content to improve its quality like a living document. It allows people to have a conversation around each page (notice the discussion tab on every page). For students of course it means not only do they have wikipedia’s body of knowledge but pages specific to their courses. these pages can be customised and even if they lose their physical books its always there online (and download a copy of the book as a PDF or an Ebook).
What can you do from there?
Plenty! Right now the wiki pages are almost a blank canvas (I only started a few hours ago), with outlines/table of content. But because the books themselves are uploaded, there is more than enough material to build up from.
If you are a teacher/parent/academic or just simple interested in helping out, then you could contribute the following to the pages:
- Spread the word! forward this email, share some of this on social media, or NGOs that you think would benifit.
- Go and download the ebooks from the drop box https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=0082F4EFC6FED92E&id=82F4EFC6FED92E%21105
- Upload them to wikicommons and do not forget to tag them with categories. I used the following examples:
- (Year) الصف الاول الاعدادي
- (Term) الفصل الدراسي الثاني
- (offical book) وزارة التربية و التعليم
- (country) جمهرية مصر العربية
3. Create a wikisource index using the same name as the wiki-commons file example:
The file Science.Tr1.pdf in wikicommons becomes https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Science.Tr1.pdf
4. For each wiki-source page you can then edit the content and create a page that completes the picture for example make the title link to an article page (in the since example the title was set to [[Science 1st year Secondary School 1st Term]] which then allows you to create https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_1st_year_Secondary_School_1st_Term
Are there legal concerns?
Good question, it doesn’t look like it. According to Article 141 of Intellectual Property Law 82 of 2002, these works are not an object of copyright in Egypt because they are official documents. Regardless of their source or target language, all official documents are ineligible for protection in Egypt(use wikipedia’s {{PD-Egypt-official}} license category).. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egyptian_Intellectual_Property_Law_82_of_2002_(English).pdf)and while final decision rests upon the Egyptian government of course the fact that they have made them public to anyone over the internet via a Microsoft Open Drive speaks for their intent on how these books are to be used. (https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=0082F4EFC6FED92E&id=82F4EFC6FED92E%21105)
