Before 1990 when the World Wide Web first came into being, an ambitious project like an online self-taught curriculum — Christian or otherwise — just was not possible. The technology wasn’t there. Actually, the technologies weren’t there. Several things had to be developed (invented) first. Then they needed to be merged in some cohesive way somehow.
By someone.
But an online curriculum doesn’t just need a website to host all of its courses and lessons. It needs to have had back there in the production phase a whole bevy of digital tools and applications for teachers and curriculum developers to use to have been able to create all those courses and lessons in the first place, in a creative and compelling way, and then make them accessible and available — and affordable — to students and viewers all over the world.
That took another couple of decades.
Also, a new century and a new millennium.
It also required Microsoft and Yahoo and Salman Khan to come together in an extraordinary way that nobody could have predicted before 2005.
The Math of Khan
If you don’t know the story of how the incomparable and seemingly invincible Khan Academy became a “thing” in the early 21st century, you really should … what else? … do a Google search of Sal and of the online public education juggernaut that bears his name. Read the Wikipedia articles on him and it. Watch some online (YouTube) videos of him and it.
There, you will find the inspiration and the impetus behind what later became a modest, affordable, private enterprise alternative to the free and lavishly-funded Khan Academy: the K-12 Ron Paul Curriculum.
That was a project I was proud to be a part of. I ended up producing four years of math courses for the Ron Paul Curriculum: beginning arithmetic for the primary, elementary grade levels (1-4).
Whereas Khan Academy is a sort of hodge-podge of excellent (thanks to Sal Khan’s exceptional teaching ability) screencast video lessons on different topics and a growing variety of academic subjects, the Ron Paul Curriculum is an all-in-one, soup-to-nuts, K-through-12 curriculum that offers a full course of study for college-prep and career and business. Khan is designed to work in conjunction with classroom teaching; RPC is a comprehensive, standalone program designed for self-paced learning.
The RPC opened for enrollment in the Fall of 2013. You can visit the original website here:
https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/
You can also visit the updated website (2021) here:
https://www.ronpaulonlinecurriculum.com/
RPC is a prime example of the emerging possibilities that now exist for a fully online, self-taught curriculum reflecting and reinforcing a specific worldview. But we don’t need just one. We need many. Also, there are several paid Christian curriculum programs out there. We need one that is FREE as well as explicitly, consistently, coherently and comprehensively Christian and fully online, screencast-based. We need many of those, too.
Thanks to that stupendous and now legendary convergence of events in 2005 involving Microsoft, Yahoo and Salman Khan and his mathematically-challenged, young cousins, all of this is now possible.
What’s Next?
That is the subject of this series of articles.
Khan Academy and Ron Paul Curriculum have shown us the potential for changing education for the better.
We have the digital tools to follow in their footsteps and create a completely online curriculum that is fully and self-consciously Christian and biblical in its worldview. From top to bottom, inside and out. Trinitarian, Creationist, covenantally and eschatologically confident in the future of God’s kingdom on earth prior to our Lord Jesus Christ’s return. This should be reflected in every subject and lesson and concept discussed. The digital tools for doing this will keep getting better. They are plenty good now for the task at hand.
I will be talking about some of these tools. Specifically, the ones that I use and have used for creating my online courses and lessons. I will talk about software applications and hardware for creating lessons and courses, and I will talk about online platforms where these courses and lessons can be hosted and delivered to students and parents on-demand on any device.
They are amazingly cheap. They are also amazingly powerful and versatile compared to what we had just a decade or two ago.
Technology marches on.
Let’s join the parade!