DISQO is an open education community for teaching, collaborating and learning.
Our mission is to give everyone access to a first rate education. Anyone can benefit from the free online lessons, courses and curricula published here.

FAQ


Who are we and what do we do?

We are a community of educators. We collaborate to build lessons and curricula which, while offered for donation to under-developed communities, are free for anyone to use.

Who is DISQO for?

Teachers 

  • DISQO is a portal for teachers to collaborate and create innovative learning tools.
  • Teachers can assign their students with self-learning tasks.
  • Teachers can easily monitor students progress and study patterns.

Learners

  • Students can take any lesson and enroll in any course for free.
  • DISQO empowers students to take control of their own learning.
  • Students can get meaningful help from the community by engaging in the course specific forums.
  • Students naturally develop critical analysis skills by assessing courses and lessons they have chosen to take.

Parents

  • DISQO lets parents easily take an active role in their children's education by guiding them into and through appropriate lessons and courses created by seasoned professionals, while being able to unobtrusively monitor their children's progress as they grow in knowledge and into independent learners

How is DISQO different from other educational websites?

The process. There is a huge amount of educational material on the web, much of which is erroneous at worst, difficult to find or disjointed at best, and overwhelmingly, of dubious pedagogical merit and legitimacy. The DISQO open-source process of collating, ranking, sorting and combining learning and teaching materials makes methodical, structured, accurate, cutting edge educational content easy to contribute, find and engage.

Within this process there are three key points:

  • Sponsorship program for active teachers and developers. We appreciate the time, effort and skill needed to create great educational material. Anyone who posts original lessons has the opportunity to receive income from pay-per-click banner sponsorship. DISQO takes a small percentage of this money to keep the site running. Another small percentage goes to any course coordinators who use the lesson in their courses. The rest goes to the lesson developer.
  • Lessons are communal building blocks for creating sequenced, high quality, evolving courses. When a teacher or interactive developer posts a lesson, that lesson goes into the pool of resources for all members of the DISQO community to use. Each lesson can be seemlessly dragged into any course or curriculum. It can also be used concurrently with other courses and curricula. This means that superior material can be used over and over again, in multiple fields, enhancing everyone's learning experience and improving the overall value of all the courses it is a piece of. The whole becomes worth more than the sum of its parts.
  • DISQO keeps track of your progress as you complete lessons and courses directly on the site. When a learner enrols in a DISQO course, every aspect of their learning can be undertaken right on the site and their progress is recorded. This is useful both for the learner and the teacher. The learner can see how they are progressing. The teacher can see how effective their lessons and courses are at achieving the learning goals.

How does DISQO work?

For students, it's simple. Search through our content to find educational material. A "lesson" is a 30 second to 45 minute video, interactive exercise or game, reading or exam that can be played right on your browser without leaving our site. "Courses" make up the backbone of DISQO. They are sequenced progressions of approximately 5 to 50 lessons on a particular topic, (say "Ants" or "British Kings and Queens" or "Introductory Japanese") that together give a detailed understanding of that topic. You can also think of them as playlists. A "curriculum" meanwhile is a structured progression of courses and lessons that gives a comprehensive understanding of a particular subject area across a broad range of topics, usually encompassing 6 months to six years of study, depending on the subject and the target age group. However, these are loose definitions of how courses and curriculums work within DISQO and specific examples may vary widely in time scale, scope and may embrace more than one subject or faculty of learning at a time.

Students are encouraged to enroll in courses and curriculums as enrolling opens up a variety of extra features including the ability to engage in ongoing course/curriculum forums and live tutorials.

As a teacher (all DISQO users have the ability to be both teacher and student) you have access to an ever expanding database of free to use resources including lesson plans, lessons, courses and full curricula. You also have access to videos of great teachers in action giving lectures or facilitating games and activities which may help with you own learning environments.

Whether a professional teacher or an enthusiastic hobbyist with a generous heart, DISQO gives you the power to create learning tools for your own use or to share and develop with a wide educator community. As a teacher we ask you to contribute and develop you best content for teaching and learning, as well as critiquing other educational material on DISQO. Our ardent belief is that with your help we can achieve our ambitions goals as described below.


What are our short and long-term goals?

  • Long-term we aim to make high quality learning tools available to all.
  • Short-term, we are working towards building a solid database of educational content for our site.
  • In quantitative terms:
  • At least five lessons in all 126 subject areas of the site by the end of March 2010. COMPLETE
    Stable beta version of the site ready for public launch end of July 2010. COMPLETE
    A full basic Japanese course suitable for JPLT-4 preparation.
    Secure funding to continue our efforts.


What progress has been made towards our goals?

  • Over the course of 2009-10 we have created the framework for the DISQO website. It is now ready for the public to view, register, and enrol in our published learning content. Once registered, users can now publish their content and collaborations to the site for the benefit of all.
  • As for our long term goal, a modest start, but we have 105 registered users.

How does DISQO maintain quality?

Basically through examination. We are constantly working with various qualifying organisations to create DISQO compliant examinations. Wherever possible, we will gain varification of the content of these exams by the leading relevant organisations. From there, quality filters down because the lessons and courses that teach accurately towards the examinations develop the most successful students


How can you get help?

  • If you are new to DISQO, a great place to start is the "How to DISQO" tutorial.
  • If your questions remain unanswered and aren't answered below or in the about page, look on the main forum. If you still have no luck, post a question there. A member of the DISQO community will try to answer you as soon as possible.

Where does the name DISQO come from?

DISQO, pronounced "disco" is a bastardisation of the Latin word to learn and stands for the Database of Internet Schooling and Qualifying Organisations.