Though the group might be interested in this message I received from a fellow Carnegie-Mellon Alum:

My name is Yush, and I graduated from CMU 2010, where I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering.

I’ve been working on an initiative whose mission is to make a quality education universally available. We’re organizing a national-scale teaching corps of recently graduated students, who will come together and create online courseware that will be available to the world. As a fellow alumn, I’m writing to request your help.

The initiative is a nonprofit called the Pensieve Foundation, and the technical infrastructure is a publishing platform, much like a “Wikipedia for Courses”. Without being a programmer, anybody can visit the site and create highly interactive online courseware. I wrote the platform over the course of the past year (http://www.pensieve.net/about). The next step is to generate content, and build a community.

In order to do so, we’ve built a team and are working with university student leaders throughout the nation to aid in the recruiting effort. How-to blogs and videoclip playlists are common on the internet, but quality instruction is exceedingly rare, due to the difficulty in generating it. In order to overcome this, we will gather a critical mass of brilliant undergraduates guided by experienced educators, and over the course of several months we will work through the process of planning, creating, editing, and reviewing their courses. We will group students who are subject matter experts with film majors and writers to deliver the most engaging and effective educational experience that is possible. At the end of the program, each team will have created a complete curriculum end-to-end. This course then becomes public domain, and others can build upon it and teach it indefinitely.

Because of their universal value, we will start by creating open source language courses. We expect to create a full semester introduction to the 10 most commonly spoken languages in the world after our session of operation. Ultimately, the vision is to create a self-sustaining educational ecosystem covering all realms of knowledge (academic or otherwise).

It’s early on, but so far our mentorship board already consists of professors from Yale, Harvard, and NYU, as well as corporate leaders from companies such as Intel and Google. We have only begun reaching out to student leaders, but have about a dozen or so universities already on board with this. We’ve been working hard – and will continue to do so until the project is successful. But we need help to move forward.

Right now, our biggest need is funding, but there are many ways of getting involved. If you are interested, have suggestions on who we else can reach out to, or have other ideas on how we can move forward, please let me know and I will happily give you more information.

Sincerely,

Yush Gupta
Pensieve Founder
yush@pensieve.net | 484.515.0351

Note: Pensieve is NOT affiliated with Carnegie Mellon, and this is NOT an official CMU communication. I’m reaching out to you as a fellow alumn.

Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
This message was sent via the Carnegie Mellon University Online Community online community.