Overview
Open Degree is the public standard for learning: a shared, open standard that makes skills, outcomes, and credentials portable across schools, platforms, and careers. Its knowledge is one open graph. Every concept worth learning is a node, stated as something you can do, connected to what to learn before and after, tied to an evidence-based assessment, and backed by a verifiable micro-credential you truly own. A learner jumps to the concept they need instead of the course that contains it, and if the concept is missing, asks for it and the graph grows. Built as a nonprofit commons with free AI tooling, Open Degree helps learners, educators, and employers speak the same language, so progress is recognized anywhere.
It is two things at once:
- A standard. A small, open data format for describing a concept as something someone can do, what to learn before it, how to learn it, how it is assessed, and how it is credentialed. Any school, platform, or employer can read and write it.
- A curriculum. A single, free, open-source graph of concepts built on that format and grown through crowdsourcing, the way open-source software is built: propose, review, merge, version. It grows on demand: reach for a concept nobody has written and a stub is created for the next person to build on.
What Open Degree is not
Section titled “What Open Degree is not”- Not a school. Open Degree does not enroll students or employ teachers.
- Not a platform. Open Degree does not host courses, run gamification, or track learners. It publishes the graph; it does not remember which nodes you have proven or choose the next one for you. That is the job of learning engines such as DIY Degree, which accepts many teachers and course sources and lets a learner quickly find the best options and piece together a degree. Open Degree is one of the sources a learner can select there, and any other platform can walk the graph the same way.
- Not a set of courses. Courses exist in Open Degree, but as optional paths through the graph. The unit of the curriculum is the concept, not the container.
- Not a gatekeeper. Nothing here requires permission, payment, or enrollment.
Building blocks
Section titled “Building blocks”| Block | Question it answers | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The graph | How does every concept relate to every other? | Every outcome and its prerequisites, taken together. See The Graph |
| Domain | What broad area of skill is this? | src/content/domains/ |
| Outcome (a node) | What, specifically, can the learner do, and how do they learn and prove it? | src/content/outcomes/ |
| Stub | Which concept has someone reached for that nobody has written yet? | An outcome with status: stub |
| Coherence map | What should be learned before and after, layer by layer, within a domain? | Derived from outcome prerequisites |
| Course | What curated path teaches a connected set of outcomes? | src/content/courses/ |
| Assessment | What evidence shows the outcome is mastered? | src/content/assessments/ |
| Credential | Which outcomes and assessments earn a verifiable micro-credential? | src/content/credentials/ |
Each block is one Markdown file with YAML frontmatter. Every file is readable by people, by Obsidian, by this site’s build, and by any platform that wants to import it.
Status
Section titled “Status”Open Degree is at version 0.1 and everything in it is a draft. The two seed domains, Geometry and Data Literacy, exist to show the format end to end, not to be complete. One node, the triangle congruence criteria, is a stub: it shows the graph reaching past what has been written. See Contributing to fill it, or to ask for the concept you need.