Quality. Scale. Impact. Each of these describes the challenges facing educational innovation, and especially open education innovation. We're flipping typical approaches on their head, and using scale as an input rather than a quality to be achieved by educational innovation. And we're doing this by leveraging Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Education Practice (OEP) reinforced with strong professional development activities. These form the inputs to the Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx)—led by MIT, the Tata Institute for Social Sciences and the Tata Trusts. CLIx will incorporate thoughtful pedagogical design and leverage contemporary technology, including online capabilities, to provide quality educational content and experiences at scale. The initiative aims to reach a total of approximately 1,000 schools and 150,000 students in high school in 3 states in India during 2015–2017, as well as conduct professional development for approximately 2,700 teachers.
CLIx catalyzes access to quality learning opportunities at scale that are capable of changing what Indian students and teachers know and can do. We believe that a massive quality intervention, providing curricular alternatives to students and teachers through the power of OER and OEP, can irreversibly 'change the game', improving the Indian education system and what Indian youth learn.
We'll present an overview of the project with our initial plans, review the mathematics sciences and English modules we have under development, and describe the delivery platform and implementation challenges. And we'll discuss how we can and are leveraging the CLIx model to reach underserved populations around the world.
