OpenEd

Article summary

OpenEd is an online catalog of educational assessments, homework assignments, videos, games and lesson plans aligned to every Common Core standard and several other standards, and includes the only open source formative item bank. The site offers the ability for teachers to assign resources to their students online, letting students take assessments, do homework etc. on their own computers or tablets. Assignments done online are graded automatically and presented to the teacher in a mastery chart. OpenEd's slogan mentions "assessment to instruction" meaning, formative assessments given on OpenEd can access OpenEd's large catalog on a per student basis to recommend the right resource to each student individually. The company has stated that functionality of searching the site and most of its resources are free and will continue to be free going forward. However, the company is also distributing premium content from publishers such as Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to teachers for $9.95 per month. Currently 450,000 teachers or about 15% of all USA teachers are registered users. Recently, the company has been providing its resources with alignments to other tech companies. The API for finding standard and skill-aligned resources is used by ed tech leaders such as ACT (test), Pearson PLC, Pacific Metrics and many more.

Key claims

1. date of foundation: 2012 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. The record states that the date of foundation is "2012". What evidence would count against this claim?
3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1359634194