OpenCurriculum is a delightful curriculum planning tool that helps you quickly create effective lessons and units, using our library of high-quality ready-to-go ideas and an easy-to-use editor.
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You’ll find hundreds of rigorous and engaging lessons, strategies, activities, enduring understandings, formative assessments, discussion questions, and worksheets written by expert teachers, researchers, and publishers in the tool. Just-in-time reminders offer these ideas when you need them, saving you from hours of research. You can pick and drop whatever you think will work for your students, into your own plans.
It’s just like Google Docs, but with more support and structure for expressing what and how you want to teach. It gives you creative ways to express your curriculum and instructional design ideas, without forcing you into fill-in-the-box templates. Drop the assessments, links, books, videos, images, etc. from the tool onto your learning management system for students to get in on the fun.
OpenCurriculum has so many ways for you to share plans with your colleagues and supervisors. Use Google Docs-style permissions to pick exactly who can see and edit your plans, while allowing permissions to trickle down in sub-plans. Share with entire departments or PLCs in one shot, using the “Groups” feature. With the “Libraries” feature, you can catalog, track, and archive materials inside folders and easily filter based on tags. Just like Gmail search, OpenCurriculum’s instant search lets you find things across your school and beyond quickly.
See your courses, units, and lessons laid out visually to see where you are now and where you are going. Switch between planner and calendar views to visualize your week, overlaid by your Google calendar schedule. Hide courses and units and preview full plans to instantly see the big picture and teeny tiny details all together.
Whether you are planning for in-person learning, hybrid classrooms, or remote learning, planning can give you the clarity you need to help your students succeed, without becoming mundane. No matter how many years you have taught for, lesson and unit planning pushes your practice forward.
OpenCurriculum helps you shape transformative classroom moments. It nudges you towards student-first planning by helping you to adapt curriculum to what students are excited about right now. The outcome is lessons and units that lead to discovery, depth of understanding, and the good kind of rigor. These help you replace uninteresting textbook exercises and boost your students’ learning everyday.
OpenCurriculum takes the stress out of aligning your plans to standards or other learning goals. You can use an easy-to-use standards picker to choose from national or state standards, or learning targets made at your school. Or even pick unit standards from course plans, or lesson standards from unit plans. This keeps all your plans coherent, and never lets your curriculum go out of whack. You can even customize templates to design with the end in mind, in a breeze.
It’s just like Google Docs, but with more support and structure for expressing what and how you want to teach. It gives you creative ways to express your curriculum and instructional design ideas, without forcing you into fill-in-the-box templates. Drop the assessments, links, books, videos, images, etc. from the tool onto your learning management system for students to get in on the fun.
Seeing the overall picture of a course’s units and a unit’s lessons in one glance is invaluable. OpenCurriculum automagically creates scopes & sequences to show you the most important highlights of units, and pacing guides for already scheduled courses and units, which show you similar information, but on a calendar timeline. You can then pick & choose which sections from each plan show up on the highlights pages.
OpenCurriculum takes the loneliness out of the planning process. It offers suggestions, explanations, reminders, and starting points like activity names and handout templates to make every step feel collaborative and supportive.
OpenCurriculum gives curriculum and instruction leaders the tools to implement change that leads to long-lasting improvement in school-wide curriculum mapping and instructional practices.
Start with a mission and school philosophy and allow the tool to help you embed it across all steps of the curriculum design process. Use custom templates with tips to guide teachers to respond to specific prompts. Use course plans to articulate a course philosophy and focus, which guides all units and lessons. Write school-wide learning outcome statements for teachers to pick from. You can also make activity templates that outline your school’s learning model, for teachers to pick from during the lesson plan designing process.
Start tracking standards, planning processes, vocabulary, learning objectives, assessments, and more across course, unit, and lesson plans, and more as soon as teachers start using the tool. OpenCurriculum’s meticulously designed reporting features are accessible through a single click, and take no time to learn or tweak. Put up your analytics dashboard on a big screen in your office and watch the progress on your school’s planning numbers update everyday.
OpenCurriculum emphasizes tying every curricular choice and instructional move to intentional pre-established learning goals. The tool has an overall focus on helping teachers and curriculum coordinators think through different student needs, and tie all taught curriculum to planned assessment. This creates better assessment performance and career and college-readiness outcomes for students, school-wide.
OpenCurriculum allows teachers to do normally difficult communication about curricular design with the swiftness of a modern social media app, using likes, instant replies, threads, notifications, and more. This significantly improves communication across your school and brings teachers of different grades and subjects onto the same page.
You can find some of the highest-rated curriculum aligned to popular learning standards inside the tool. Gone are the days when you had to shop around for vendors selling opaque and costly packaged curriculum that did not align with learning standards. Continued use of OpenCurriculum over a year gives you the confidence to begin replacing textbooks. It is packed with instructional ideas for higher-order learning.
OpenCurriculum gives continuous professional development a brand new spin. Watching our free curriculum and instructional design videos, along with daily 10-minutes use of OpenCurriculum's planning features, gives teachers more relevant pedagogy improvement ideas than a summer of training. This allows you to have year-long professional development like that of well-funded school systems, at a fraction of the budget.
Most of OpenCurriculum’s curriculum planning features are free for individual teachers and small schools or departments (through the “Team” plan). Beyond that, the pricing for the paid plan is simple, affordable, and transparent. You do not need to speak to a pushy sales stranger on the phone to get started.
Ideal for small schools, committees, and single departments.
Ideal for all schools, colleges, nonprofits, and publishers.
Ideal for all school districts and other clusters of schools, and universities.
Number of users*
1
Up to 10 users
Up to 200 users
Minimum 10 users
More than 200 users
10 course limit
50 course limit
Unlimited courses
Unlimited courses
200 MB
1.5 GB total
1 GB per user
1 GB per user
$300 / set
Discounted bulk pricing
General inquiries support
General inquiries support
3-day business email support
Priority support
* A user is anyone who has login access and editing capabilities. This includes curriculum administrators, teachers, department heads, and general school administrators.
Is your school in a conflict, disaster, or extreme-poverty affected area? And do you serve students who would otherwise go unserved? If so, all paid features of OpenCurriculum are free forever to your school. We’d be humbled to help if using good curriculum is a priority for you under such circumstances.
Select your role to see the relevant video demos of OpenCurriculum:
OpenCurriculum is a nonprofit that makes tools that help you create transformative learning experiences for your students, using the best educational ideas.
So far, you have been burdened with constantly needing to find better ways to make your students succeed. You scour the internet late into the night, seek and attend a lot of professional development, and frequently change how or what you teach. Often, a lot of what you come across is either expensive or is less relevant and hard to grasp and implement.
We find, simplify, and curate contextually-relevant ideas for your day-to-day teaching. These ideas include findings from research and practice on pedagogical strategies, curriculum design, content knowledge, equity, student needs, excellent lesson planning, and meeting standards you intend to align with.
We believe the difference between insufficient education and great educational experiences is a lot of these small ideas in practice.
Normally, new educational ideas are shared with complex one-size-fits-all action plans that require you and your colleagues to change your practices entirely. They don’t build around the lives of the students, the philosophy, the culture, and the learning models at your school.
We do things differently. Our simple planning tool puts the power in your hands. It lets you pick bite-sized ideas to place in your curricular plans and assessments. It then helps you link all the plans and ideas together, so you and your school can bring them to life in your instructional practice.
We capture, catalog, and vet the most important ideas found in research papers, evidence from classroom practice, publisher and teacher-authored curriculum, and classroom stories. Learn how.
We use a first-of-its-kind underlying universal language for curriculum, instruction, and assessment, to express these ideas and make them transcend borders. Learn how.
We surface and sprinkle these ideas on a magic canvas—our free planning tool—that gives you and your team planning superpowers. These superpowers help you recognize gaps, draw connections, and offer the very best learning experiences to all your students. And we build a better understanding of what improving curriculum involves, so we can add features to the tool that help teachers do these steps sooner. Learn how.
We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization grateful to our families, teachers, and the following funders:
If you are an education funder, please consider reaching out to us so we can add you to this list.
We'd love to hear from you about how we can do a better job in supporting you, your school, or your organization, with great curriculum. At this moment, we aren't interested in inserting backlinks to external content, product development outsourcing, and unsolicited sign-ups to your mailing lists.
Email us at
hello@opencurriculum.org
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Or send us mail at
3740 Cedargate Way
Sacramento, CA - 95834
USA