Why do we need a Universal Learning Tree or Skills map?
A major part of our approach is creating a very clear and relevant path for students to progress from one level of knowledge to another. In a typical classroom, we learn various concepts in a certain order, usually dictated to us by a prescribed curriculum. These curriculums exist in various forms, as defined by a country, region or even local schools where they are being used. Each one is slightly different from the other and none take into account the fact that everyone learns in a different way and at different pace.
So we started thinking about how to build an educational platform which would work in any social-economic environment or culture and be able to accommodate a variety of learning styles? What if we were to offer every single possible lesson from all known curriculums and allow a student to select those which resonate most with their individual learning abilities?
The concept of choosing your learning path alone is worth a separate post, but what I would like to share here is that in the process of deciding how to create such an open and all inclusive platform, we realized that in order to do that we would need to have a map of all of those individual lessons out there in the world so that they could be linked together in a such way where logical educational progression would be possible. We called it a Universal Learning Tree. What we soon learned, is that we were not alone in thinking about this approach, I invite you watch a video of one of our big inspirations, Danny Hillis, where he proposes that such a map should be built and talks about why it is the next step in human education.
See the work we are doing on this here