Open Assembly

Open Assembly is an online platform that provides courses and content for educators.

Open Assembly is an modular framework for assembling, adapting, and sharing open courseware using unbundled, bite-sized content. It’s specifically designed for collaboration and content curation in flipped or online learning environments. Open Assembly is tackling a big gap in education technology: the absence of truly permeable open courseware. Existing courseware offerings (open and proprietary) are not designed for collaborative learning and instruction, and they’re difficult for students and educators to reuse or adapt to local needs. Nor do they accommodate today’s participatory culture. Open Assembly allows instructors to customize or adapt digital curricula, collaborate with colleagues or peers, and personalize instruction. It helps students become creators, not consumers, of learning content, encourages responsible content sharing and curation, and facilitates the development of collaborative skills. By leveraging the inherent shareability of open educational resources (OER), Open Assembly engages instructors and students in the production, transmission, and broadcasting of knowledge--co-teaching, co-learning, co-researching. OER make this truly possible, at little or no cost. Open Assembly complements existing OER products, services, and initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenStax College, Lumen Learning, MERLOT, Connexions, and others—with a toolkit that combines functionalities that have not been integrated into a single product, until now: --easily reuse, adapt, and revise open courseware (e.g. MIT OCW) as modular course templates; --assemble learning playlists with unbundled, chapter-level content from peer-reviewed open textbooks and proprietary content; --curate additional content, including rich media, from within a course or project; --share content with anyone else, inside or outside of a given course or project; --engagement analytics. Open Assembly gives every educator the opportunity to be a learner, and every learner the opportunity to become an educator. Users are not required to identify themselves as instructors or students: it is just as likely that a user could be administering a course as participating in one.