Open EdTech has a new website. The old one had grown into a jumble of membership pages, a shop and a donation form, and it no longer said clearly what this project is for. This one does, or at least tries to.
Here is the aim in one sentence. We want your AI to behave like a good teacher, and we want it to connect you with good teachers you can meet face to face. Everything else on the site is the machinery needed to make those two things work, and to make them something you can trust.
That machinery has a name now. We call it the Coach: an application that belongs to you, holds the record of everything you learn across your whole life, and shares it with AI assistants and with the organisations you learn from only on your say-so. It looks first for a class, a group or a mentor near you before it reaches for a screen. It runs on your own device if you have one, or somewhere hosted for you if you don’t, and you can leave with everything at any time.
None of this is built yet. The Plans page sets out why we think the idea makes sense, what the current design looks like, which standards it builds on, how software will be certified, and what exists so far. The honest answer to the last one is “a few prototypes in progress”. The design has open questions, and the page says which ones. We would rather show the working than pretend to a finished product.
The project itself is not new. It began with a festival in Barcelona in November 2019, where a roomful of people from open source projects, universities, non-profits and governments agreed on a set of guiding principles that still hold. What has changed since then is AI, and with it what learning technology has to do. The proposal on this site is our answer to that.
If you want to take part, the Community page explains how. The short version: say hello in the Matrix room and tell us what you would like to work on. Teaching experience, criticism, research and testing are as welcome as code. Open meetings will be announced here as the work develops.
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Thanks for reading. There is a lot to do.