Contact Information: Elliot Volkman Elliot@opencompass.org Opencompass.org | Ureddit.

com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 1, 2013

Open Compass Seeks to Open Education

A new non-profit seeks to splice existing educational models into a more effective balance
Open Compass is a non-profit organization that aims to build on the ideals of crowdsourced, community-oriented online education that allows anyone with a passion or an interest to either study or teach. Open Compass also aims to work with traditional brick and mortar educational institutions to hybridize traditional education and modern technologies. It intends to open the doors to higher education to anyone with a motivation to learn, regardless of their means or location. Rather than looking to follow suit with existing MOOCs or trying to compete with them, we seek to create a new paradigm for online education that strikes a careful balance between teachers and students by providing a sophisticated, completely open platform for both, said Open Compass President Anastas Stoyanovsky. The success of the combination of the traditional setting for higher education and of online teaching via a class taught simultaneously at the University of South Florida and in our proof of concept community, University of Reddit, motivated us to aim to develop this new paradigm. The motivation for the formation of Open Compass to pursue this model is the success of an initial informal trial in which a university class recorded lectures and discussion board were opened to the public and drew in motivated students from dozens of countries, which built on with the organic growth of an online community built around being open to both teachers and students. The fundamental goal of Open Compass is to create an online platform that abstains from the model of simply delivering recorded content and instead opens formal courses to online users in order to shape a class culture around real-time teaching, while still allowing self-paced learning. Rather than asking online users to silently absorb prepackaged content, all users will be encouraged to interact with their fellow students. Whether those students happen to be in a classroom or across the world, cooperative growth and shared learning will be fostered. Carefully combining teaching methods that have withstood the tests of time with modern technology could well instigate a societal and cultural shift in contemporary education; we intend to be that catalyst.

Open Compass extends an invitation to passionate teachers and prospective students who want to participate in the evolution of education.

Open Compass: Leading you to open education. Open Compass is a non-profit organization that fosters education through community. ###