Frequently Asked Questions

Open Planner FAQ's

• What is an "open planning team"?
• How might a peer review process work?
• Can I form a team of one?
• I work hard for a living. Why should I "donate" my intellectual property to the public?
• Can I include images and attachments in my posts?
• Does my work have to be public?
  

What is an "open planning team"?

Setting up an "open planning team" creates an online workspace that allows groups of educators to more easily collaborate around common authoring goals. The Open Planner environment enables groups to:

• establish curricular objectives, group norms, and shared pedagogical understandings to guide any group authoring or curriculum development process.
• maintain a set of easy-to-navigate, organized curriculum pages where all document revisions are saved, and it is easy to "revert" to a previous revision.
• allow all other educators to benefit from and comment upon their authoring efforts.
• selectively decide who gets a subscription and who has full editing ("primary author") privileges on the group's documents. Team managers control these settings from the "Teams I manage" section of their dashboard.
  
• optionally recieve email communications every time a new curriculum page, forum post, or comment is made by another group member by editing "my subscription."
• decide the selectivity of group membership when team managers choose "open," "moderated," or "closed" in the group's home page settings.

How might a peer-review process work?

The Open Planner team is working on a design that allows individuals and teams to create a WORKFLOW to improve the quality of a given set of curriculum resources.  Draft curriculum pages would be flagged "awaiting peer review" and members of that team would see a note reminding them to provide feedback. 

Can I form a team of one?

Yes. Open Planner is designed to enable teachers to be more effective. Part of our goal is to create an authoring environment that is superior to paper-based planning, shuttling files, carrying around a laptop, or relying on school servers to keep your instructional systems organized. This benefit is compounded by creating a professional community in which to have your work appreciated, critiqued, and improved by others. While we hope and believe educators will naturally seek out team relationships with kindred spirits, it is quite possible many will desire to simply work alone while allowing other educators to comment for the purposes of feedback and support. By all means, start a team of one! Others will likely want to join you.

I work hard for a living. Why should I "donate" my intellectual property to the public?

Our founders are teachers trying to operate a web-based non-profit while carrying a full class load...so we can sympathize with the fear of suckerdom, martyrdom, or other forms of dumb.

Nevertheless, we believe there are certain aspects of community life in which intellectual property rights obstruct the full attainment of both the common and individual good. We believe the profession of educating young people is such a domain.

Because of workload and professional isolation, few of our best teachers' wisdom is able to be known to the world. We believe a well-connected and intellectually engaged community of teacher-authors can produce superior instructional resources and more widespread student benefit than any effort in the world of copyrighted educational resources.

The good reasons for sharing one's time and resources extend far beyond their obvious altruism and nobility. We believe the self-interests of all contributors are quite well served in a creative network. Curriculum that has evolved from the careful feedback of a multitude of users gains unmatched power and perspective in the classroom, and this translates into a greater sense of professional efficacy, lower stress, and a feeling of confidence in one's belonging to a professional community. We are confident that new teaching opportunities, friendships, paid curriculum development gigs and educational leadership roles will present themselves naturally for those members whose contributions bring a clear benefit to the profession. We urge you to trust in the power of the network. Your efforts will be rewarded!

Does my work have to be public?

By default, all posts made within a team are "public" in the sense that anyone, anonymous or not, can see them. This is the case because, for almost all of the work we imagine being posted here (even the roughest of drafts) could be of use to another educator, and is better off being made available.Â

You can decide, however, to make certain posts private: When creating a post within a planning team, in the "Teams" section, simply deselect the "public" checkbox. This will make the post visible only to members of the teams you select in the other checkboxes. This may be your preference for dealing with early drafts...as you might not be comfortable going public with a document until the group has had a chance to revise it.