We are happy to welcome teachers and hopefully students to this new learning management site for OPEN. Teachers will be able to access OPEN's curriculum, and connect and discuss with teachers and students throughout the world wide OPEN network through this site.
This Teacher Guide and classroom curricula lessons are intended as an introduction to our Sustainable Agriculture Project-Based Learning (PBL) STEM program series. It is set up in two sections, our in class curricula is especially written to prepare students that have little or no farm or garden experience, or much life science background for our PBL school garden plot global research experiment, and the second offers detailed instructions for outdoor school and/or farm plot preparation and a successive implementation of regenerative practices to be tested in the real world at school gardens and smallholder farms.
Each of the introductory in class lessons may take one to three class sessions depending on teacher class time and activities selected to be the focus for each lesson. Lessons 1-3 are the introductory in classroom lessons which teachers may choose skip or use them as for review basic botany and biogeochemical cycles with students. In Lesson 4 students and teachers progress to our detailed instruction guide. Here over a succession of seasons students and researchers will put to the test modern regenerative agriculture practices by setting up special outdoor plots and planting nutritious standard and local research crops.
The guides offer detailed instructions for preparation of diked research plots which are designed to protect against erosion and to conserve precious water resources. We continue the soil regeneration process through the addition of crop waste into topsoil, and then season 2 the use of cover crops, introduction of no till farm methods, and aerobic composting, intercropping, and a variety of means of increasing overall local biodiversity all of which will lead to sustainable agriculture development.
Students then as apprentice farmers begin the food crop planting stage, followed by the cultivation stage. Manual student record-keeping is ongoing from the start with students to submit weekly record tables and images and observations, and ultimately harvesting and measuring the yield. This data collection is the start of your students’ citizen science research experiments, and if the project progresses as intended, we next integrate smart farming sensor technologies to capture detailed information on soils, water and atmospheric conditions.
This site section is the location for ongoing conversations between various groups associated with OPEN's Sustainable Agriculture Programs.
This course provides the OPEN curriculum to go with the hydroponic units and sensors OPEN provides.
Teachers will locate teacher guidelines, unit plan, lessons and suggested pacing guide for this unit of study.
The current curriculum is designed to meet the science standards for upper elementary students (grade 5 in the USA, about age 10/11) covering application for the Plant/Botany topics, nutrient cycling and differences between agriculture and ecology. Lessons will also provide deeper understanding of the role of soil in both ecology/agriculture and nutrient cycling.
This course contains the indoor class experiments which attempt to determine the concentrations of natural organic nitrates that will inevitably leach through topsoil into groundwater aquifers or stream runoff. Students will use pots, topsoil mixtures, and recommended monitoring equipment and materials, and through scheduled waterings of the their plants measure the nitrate concentrations. The controlled environment indoor experiments attempt to simulate the situation and conditions on farmlands. Researchers will try to determine at what nitrate levels can we still obtain safe supplies of drinking water from field runoff or from water extracted later from aquifers. Students and researchers would consider ways to address this issue in obtaining safe drinking water from groundwater at or downstream from farmlands.
This Teacher Guide and classroom curricula lessons are intended as an introduction to our Sustainable Agriculture Project-Based Learning (PBL) STEM program series. It is set up in two sections, our in class curricula is especially written to prepare students that have little or no farm or garden experience, or much life science background for our PBL school garden plot global research experiment, and the second offers detailed instructions for outdoor school and/or farm plot preparation and a successive implementation of regenerative practices to be tested in the real world at school gardens and smallholder farms.
Each of the introductory in class lessons may take one to three class sessions depending on teacher class time and activities selected to be the focus for each lesson. Lessons 1-3 are the introductory in classroom lessons which teachers may choose skip or use them as for review basic botany and biogeochemical cycles with students. In Lesson 4 students and teachers progress to our detailed instruction guide. Here over a succession of seasons students and researchers will put to the test modern regenerative agriculture practices by setting up special outdoor plots and planting nutritious standard and local research crops.
The guides offer detailed instructions for preparation of diked research plots which are designed to protect against erosion and to conserve precious water resources. We continue the soil regeneration process through the addition of crop waste into topsoil, and then season 2 the use of cover crops, introduction of no till farm methods, and aerobic composting, intercropping, and a variety of means of increasing overall local biodiversity all of which will lead to sustainable agriculture development.
Students then as apprentice farmers begin the food crop planting stage, followed by the cultivation stage. Manual student record-keeping is ongoing from the start with students to submit weekly record tables and images and observations, and ultimately harvesting and measuring the yield. This data collection is the start of your students’ citizen science research experiments, and if the project progresses as intended, we next integrate smart farming sensor technologies to capture detailed information on soils, water and atmospheric conditions.
A series of seven two-week courses on the basics of Internet of Things (IoT) Industry 2021-2022 and how this knowledge and technology can be applied and effectively utilized in your community for sustainable local and regional development.
This can be taught in conjunction with the OPEN-RAK IoT DIY Sensor Kit Development Course - a hands-on IoT sensor kit building course and coding classes for programming the sensors our students and community members build.
The goal is to learn the basics and importance of this strategic technology and to develop, program, and deploy these sensors for environmental monitoring such as weather sensors at local farms and for school gardens, and for measuring pollution levels in city settings, water flow and storage and for renewable energy systems and much more.
These courses and byproducts would support real world sustainable community development applications for your region.In this course we will introduce students, (teachers, local community members, and government officials) to this critical aspect of the modern Internet. We will cover general cybersecurity concepts, current and evolving threats and vulnerabilities of our devices, software, data centers, and networking systems. We will focus on IoT Internet-connected sensors, now numbering in the billions of devices deployed worldwide, and the special tributary networks on which they operate, specifically environmental and smart farm sensors.
We will show how these edge devices and networks have become another major vulnerability for businesses and governments who operate them. We will describe how the IoT sector and other industries and governments are beginning to address this new class of device vulnerabilities and more sophisticated evolving threats. Lastly our cybersecurity expert instructor will put forth a basic roadmap of how all institutions can better protect their systems, product supply chain vulnerabilities, and in turn our societies who now more than ever depend on a secure/safe Internet end-to-end.
OPEN offered this course for primary to secondary school levels, but can be readily applied to community members also as a relevant case study example of IoT in the real world, helping protect a community from a potential cataclysmic disaster.
See how young students from Goma, with the guidance of experts from OPEN and Goma Volcano Observatory, learned to build, test and deploy their own CO2 gas monitoring sensor station on their school campus near Mt. Nyiragongo volcano. Students at Cinquantenaire School also learned how IoT networks are designed and the component elements of such a global network while building a workable device to warn their fellow citizens of and impending danger from lethal gases.
Introduction to Esri Geospatial Mapping
Technologies. Esri the global leader in location-based mapping software and services which cover a wide variety of sustainable community development applications
– Sustainable Agriculture, Forestry, Water, Land Management, Community Emergency Services, Environmental Remediation, Ecosystem Restoration Initiatives, Community Planning, and more.
This school year’s assignment is for your students to write a song about our collective future – a hopeful future, a bleak future, or something in between.
One of the goals of the Cultural Histories of the World Through Music program series is for OPEN students from around the world is to learn about one another and one another’s cultures through the songs, music history, and musical inventions which gives insights into the actual histories of our lands and peoples. These are the songs and music history that shape your culture, and which in many ways shape you and your outlook on your local environment and the world beyond.
But music is art, and art can also do much more. It can paint in a melody and descriptive lyrics a window to a hopeful or idealized future for our people and our planet. Or on the flip side, a musical “story” can warn of dire consequences and doomsday scenarios for the human race if our societies do not make the difficult behavioral changes necessary to preserve of natural world on which we depend.
Look up and listen to the song and read the lyrics of – Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire to get an idea of what others have done before. Grim.
When we first created this program we intended that OPEN students, musically gifted or not, to try their hand at songwriting, and to create a piece of music that can tell a good story about their culture and their visions of the future.
OPEN's music program focuses on the integration of music and how it expresses culture. This program hosts an international music festival with schools from around the world participating via zoom connections.
Course creators Laurel Hickey of South Shore Support Services for Special Education for young adult learners; Dr. Badewa Williams of the Royal School for Educational Therapy Foundation (RSETF) and Marie David of Vantage Point Academy have developed this course to assist teachers throughout Africa and other regions in educate special needs students for entrepreneurship and leadership skills to allow them to self-advocate and live fulfilling lives.
This series of instruction videos will show your students how to construct a working CO2 sensor to not only monitor dangerous volcano gases such as is a concern in Goma City, DR Congo, but also to track levels of this gas in the atmosphere to measure climate change impacts.
Dr. Lidamlendo's class
This "course" is for all members involved in music, sustainable agriculture, volcano monitoring and any other proposals OPEN is engaged in for the Congo.
This "course" is for music, sustainable agriculture and any other proposals OPEN is engaged in participating in.
All proposals regarding Liberia - music, sustainable agriculture, and any other country specific proposals that OPEN is engaged in.
This Teacher Guide and classroom curricula lessons are intended as an introduction to our Sustainable Agriculture Project-Based Learning (PBL) STEM program series. It is set up in two sections, our in class curricula is especially written to prepare students that have little or no farm or garden experience, or much life science background for our PBL school garden plot global research experiment, and the second offers detailed instructions for outdoor school and/or farm plot preparation and a successive implementation of regenerative practices to be tested in the real world at school gardens and smallholder farms.
Each of the introductory in class lessons may take one to three class sessions depending on teacher class time and activities selected to be the focus for each lesson. Lessons 1-3 are the introductory in classroom lessons which teachers may choose skip or use them as for review basic botany and biogeochemical cycles with students. Lesson 4 begins the field research section of the curricula with teachers and students following the outdoor field instructions. In Lesson 4 students and teachers progress to our detailed instruction guide. Here over a succession of seasons students and researchers will put to the test modern regenerative agriculture practices by setting up special outdoor plots and planting nutritious standard and local research crops.
The guides offer detailed instructions for preparation of diked research plots which are designed to protect against erosion and to conserve precious water resources. We continue the soil regeneration process through the addition of crop waste into topsoil, and then season 2 the use of cover crops, introduction of no till farm methods, and aerobic composting, intercropping, and a variety of means of increasing overall local biodiversity all of which will lead to sustainable agriculture development.
Students then as apprentice farmers begin the food crop planting stage, followed by the cultivation stage. Manual student record-keeping is ongoing from the start with students to submit weekly record tables and images and observations, and ultimately harvesting and measuring the yield. This data collection is the start of your students’ citizen science research experiments, and if the project progresses as intended, we next integrate smart farming sensor technologies to capture detailed information on soils, water and atmospheric conditions.