Digitizing curriculum standards to improve global education — an international collaboration

Learning Equality
Learning Equality
Published in
5 min readSep 30, 2021

Together, Learning Equality, Google.org, Vodafone Foundation, UNHCR, and UNESCO (as part of the Global Education Coalition in response to the COVID-19 pandemic) have been collaborating on a project aimed at digitizing and centralizing various curriculum standards so that information about them can be better understood to not only help alignment of curricula to Open Educational Resources, but also to ultimately inform automation of the alignment process. Such effort is aimed at helping teachers across the globe to adopting these free and open materials in their classrooms, with the knowledge and confidence that they are locally relevant and fit the curriculum they need to teach. Ivan Savov, B.Eng., M.Sc., Ph.D. in computer science, and machine learning researcher, has authored a report on a new model for curriculum standards data organization and alignment as part of this ongoing collaboration, about which you can read below.

Four learners engaging with Kolibri through a laptop computer in an Nigerian classroom.
Learners engaging with Kolibri in an Nigerian classroom. Photo credit: One African Child

The broad adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs) is a key pathway to closing the education equity gap globally. Given that the characteristics of OERs foster reusability, they can be more widely accessible and discoverable, even in low-resource environments, through learning platforms like Kolibri. When OERs are aligned to a particular curriculum to fit the structure and learning objectives of the local curriculum standards in a given country, this further enhances their use, and in turn, better supports learners.

However, the curriculum standards in each country are different and the process of aligning OERs to these local standards requires time, resources, and context-specific knowledge. Differences in the content focus areas, learning objectives, sequencing, cultural contexts, and pedagogical methods make it difficult for teachers with limited time for planning to discover and adopt learning resources unless they are already organized according to the local standards.

Announcing: New Data Model for Curriculum Standards and Alignment Data

To address this, we’re pleased to release a report along with Google.org, Vodafone Foundation, UNHCR, and UNESCO, as part of the Global Education Coalition in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which helps users of curriculum to better understand and leverage the curriculum standards documents that exist. This report titled, “Digitizing Curriculum Standards to Unlock the Potential of Open Educational Resources in a Global Context,” defines a data model for digitizing curriculum standards information and aims to benefit other initiatives that rely on curriculum standards data.

Cover of the report titled "Digitizing Curriculum Standards to Unlock the Potential of Open Educational Resources in a Global Context" with a photo of two girls looking down at educational tablets on a table.

Digital curriculum standards data is currently only available in a few countries and, for other countries, it is often both not readily accessible and necessitats a time-consuming process of manual digitization. Without easy access to digitized curriculum standards, curators are unable to map a curriculum to relevant OERs. The objective of the new organizational system defined in the report is to lay the foundation for digitizing curriculum standards in countries where digital standards are not available yet, encouraging further digitization work to take place, as well as to facilitate the exchange of curriculum alignment information between content repositories and learning platforms. It is intended to be applied in a global context, and incorporates the best practices and learnings from countries where digital curriculum standards are in use.

The output of having and using this data model is important for three key reasons:

  1. It provides a roadmap to start the process of digitizing curriculum standards, particularly in countries where such standards are not yet digitized.
  2. It enables the exchange of curriculum alignment information between content repositories and learning platforms (some of which has been previously proposed for aligned curriculum).
  3. It sets the stage for digitized curriculum data to inform the research and development of tools for semi-automated curriculum alignment.

The report describes specific use cases and educational activities that are enabled thanks to digitized curriculum standards. The new website called the “Repository of Organized Curriculums data server” (rocdata.global) developed in conjunction with this report provides a place to browse representative data samples, and contribute curriculum documents for potential digitization. All documents, data, and software tools developed for this project are openly licensed (CC BY-NC and MIT licenses) and available on GitHub at github.com/rocdata.

Using curriculum data

The public goods generated as part of this project (research, data, tools, processes) have the potential for broader impact on curriculum digitization efforts and the exchange of curriculum alignment data. It will ultimately promote further adoption of OERs by enabling educators and curators to more readily identify resources that are relevant to local curricula. The outputs from this report can be used alongside content curation tools like Kolibri Studio to re-organize globally produced OERs in order to make them useful in the local context of each country.

We encourage ministries of education, content producers, OER repository administrators, curriculum designers, teachers, implementing organizations, and other stakeholders interested in digital curriculum standards and the adoption of OER to take a further look so that they can understand both how:

  1. Educators, developers, and content producers can take advantage of the digital curriculum data for their own work and to build applications based on it
  2. Different key stakeholders can participate in growing the amount of digital curriculum data available
Photo of a woman and a man studying with the use of a tablet at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
Educators in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya

How we are using this model toward automated alignment

The specific goals for this new data model are to support the development of tools for automated curriculum alignment that Learning Equality began along with the organizations supporting this report, back in 2018. Together, we have led an initiative to create a set of tools that can automate the mapping of digital learning resources to national curriculum standards in an efficient manner using machine learning. The report also outlines possible next steps to inform how stakeholders can support ongoing research on automated alignment tools.

A visual representation of the work that has been done up until now around the digitization of curriculum standards to inform the creation of a semi-automated alignment tool

This report is part of an ongoing collaboration, which included a joint prototyping push in October 2019 to digitize the information encoded in curriculum standards of different countries using a unified, machine-readable data format. This report on digitization is one output of this collaboration, and in parallel, we’re continuing to work on automation.

Getting involved

You can read the report here, and we hope that you’ll help us spread the word!

If you are interested in learning more and contributing, particularly if you have machine learning, curriculum experience, or curricular documents to share, please check out the ROC to learn how to get involved.

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Published in Learning Equality

Learning Equality is committed to enabling every person in the world to realize their right to a quality education by enabling teaching and learning with technology, without the Internet.

Written by Learning Equality

We're a non-profit that creates offline education technology for the 2.6 billion people in the world who don't have access to the Internet. learningequality.org

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