An open curriculum of the world's knowledge
Skillsera is a community-powered encyclopedia which teaches educational concepts by connecting bite-sized youtube video explanations.
Wikipedia has become one of the world’s most valuable websites, a shining example of community and large-scale collaboration, and a top source for encyclopedic knowledge. It’s perhaps the best first-stop reference on the web for obtaining an overview of an unfamiliar topic. But it’s seldom sufficient by itself to lead a learner to understanding. Where wikipedia ends, books, academic papers, and youtube videos provide paths toward comprehension. Books and academic papers are wonderful sources of structured learning but publishers lock them up and package them as individual units. Their format also misses an opportunity to capitalize on the full bandwidth of the human experience which the web now makes possible (audio, visual, personal connection, interactivity). Youtube, on the other hand, has created an open culture around rapidly publishing thousands of hours of valuable educational video. There currently isn’t anything like wikipedia for rich, educational video explanations. There’s no reason a universal educational curriculum of the best linked video segments can’t be made available to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. This is the opportunity Skillsera sees.
More and more of our cultural heritage is being silo'd, locked up, and sold and accessed piecemeal. This is true for books. For academic papers. And with coursera and others, it's becoming true with lectures. We live in a world where textbooks are $200 a unit and our ability continue learning is artificially held back by our wallets and the friction of paywalls. Children not blessed with wealthy parents are presented with dead-ends and turn directionless to the web. Wikipedia tries to fill this gap with a unique paradigm which empowers us to browse unrestricted, "As We May Think" and at the speed of imagination, limited only by the quality of the content and our lack of curriculum. These are serious limitations and most of us who use Wikipedia regularly understand it to be an incredible reference source and not a silver bullet. I see Khan Academy challenging this status quo, generating quality content and creating a free directed curriculum of core content. I think there's more we can do.
Wikipedia set an important precedent of unlocking the genre of encyclopedic information open to the world. Sillsera has a fleeting opportunity set the same precedent for the genre of educational video content by leveraging YouTubeand (for now) it's open ecosystem. By focusing on educational content, similar to that found on Wikipedia and Khan Academy, and encouraging the community to organize it using a non-profit, wiki-like platform, we can build a community expectation that educational videos are as essential to life as a google search, and should be and kept open.
- Homogeneity. The unity of wikipedia is the article. The fundamental unit of Skillsera is the video
- Linking. A wikipedia article links to other articles which are related or required for comprehension. A Skillsera video has links embedded within its timeline to other videos which are related or required for comprehension. Collaboration. Wikipedia is cultivated by a diverse community of individuals who share the belief that, working together, we can evolve the world’s best encyclopedia of knowledge. Skillsera believes in the opportunity for community to unite and surface the full potential locked within hundreds of thousands of hours of educational youtube videos. Openness. Skillsera is not-for-profit. Its licenses support permissive open access. Its codebase is open source. It’s community aspires to be open and accepting.
- Accessibility & Empowerment. Wikipedia supports multiple languages, accessible design, and rich semantic markup. Skillsera aspires to be inclusive of the underserved with its design, which is especially challenging given the high bandwidth of video. Persistence & Longevity. The web changes over time. Skillsera will rely on technologies like Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and decentralized web protocols to promote persistence. We hope Skillsera is still useful in 20 years.
- Simplicity & Focus. Wikipedia designs with purpose and tries to solve a single problem for editors and knowledge-seekers, respectively: a platform for organizing and consuming encyclopedia articles. There are many people who might envision more innovative interfaces. Skillsera aspires to solve the fundamental problem of unlocking and organizing as much video knowledge as possible and making it frictionless to navigate and consume. We’ll try to resist feature creep, like annotations, even though they might be helpful.
This project does not yet require installation. It uses plain old javascript and jquery to make calls to https://api.skillsera.org (the API server).