Learning/About

The Mozilla Learning Plan

"Mozilla Learning" is the Mozilla Foundation's plan to promote universal web literacy in 2016 and beyond. Phase 2 of the planning process is now underway, and all are welcome to participate. The core elements of our work so far:

• Strategy. High-level summary of our thinking and plan to date.
• Universal web literacy. Our north star.
• Advocacy. Shifting understanding and thinking about the web.
• Leadership Development. More people teaching and advocating for web literacy.
• Partnerships. Building a global network of partners.

August 2015 update

Developing a long term Mozilla Learning strategy has been the Mozilla Foundation's big focus over the last three months. Working closely with people across our community, we’ve come up with a clear, simple goal for our work: universal web literacy. We’ve also defined ‘leadership’ and ‘advocacy’ as our two top level strategies for pursuing this goal. The use of ‘partnerships and networks’ will also be key to our efforts. These are the core elements that will make up the Mozilla Learning strategy.

Summarizing our work to date

Over the last month, we’ve summarized our thinking on Mozilla Learning for the Mozilla Board and a number of other internal audiences. This video is based on these presentations.

As you’ll see in the slides, our goal for Mozilla Learning is an ambitious one: make sure everyone knows how to read, write and participate on the web. In this case, everyone = the five billion people who will be online by 2025.

Our top level thinking on how to do this includes:

1. Leadership Development

Develop leaders who teach and advocate for web literacy.

Concretely, we will integrate our Clubs, Hive and Fellows initiatives into a single, world class learning and leadership program.

2. Advocacy

Shift thinking: everyone understands the web / internet.

Concretely, this means we will invest more in advocacy, thought leadership and user education. We may also design ways to encourage web literacy more aggressively in our products.

3. Partnerships

Build a global web literacy network.

Mozilla can’t create universal web literacy on its own. All of our leadership and advocacy work will involve ‘open source’ partners with whom we’ll create a global network committed to universal web literacy.

Moving to Phase 2: from "what" to "how"

Process-wise: we arrived at this high level strategy by looking at our existing programs and assets. We’ve been working on web literacy, leadership development and open internet advocacy for about five years now. So, we already have a lot in play. What’s needed right now is a way to focus all of our efforts in a way that will increase their impact — and that will build a real snowball of people, organizations and governments working on the web literacy agenda.

The next phase of Mozilla Learning strategy development will dig deeper on ‘how’ we will do this.

Historical context

Planning work began in Q4 of 2015 and is ongoing. We're working in the open and sharing thinking and progress as blog posts and on this wiki as we go.

• Building Mozilla Learning together (Dec 2014) -- Video -- Mark Surman -- presenting the early vision in Portland
• "Mozilla and Learning: thinking bigger" (Jan 15) -- Mark Surman -- Mozilla as a global classroom and lab. Why understanding the web matters.
• "Building an Academy" (March 31) -- Mark Surman -- What's the opportunity? What do we want to build? What do we want people to know? What do we want people to know?
• Mozilla Academy Strategy Update -- Mark Surman -- An update on the process, team and next steps.

Conversation

• Learning experiments on MDN (Feb 2) -- Justin Crawford -- How the Mozilla Developer Network might relate. Their new learning area and creating new pathways into advanced web topics
• "A Mozilla Developer Institute" (May 1) -- Phillip Schmidt -- Why Mozilla should create a "Mozilla Developer Institute" to train the next generation of technology inventors. And how Mozilla could do this by building on existing resources.
• "Walled Empires, Zero-Rating and Web Literacy" (May 8) -- Michelle Thorne -- Reflections on what internet the next billion users will find and what we can do to ensure its a platform for them to create and participate online.
• "Mozilla Academy Thoughts"(May 28) -- Laura Hilliger -- the balance b/w inclusivity and having an opinion, towards "common approaches" and thoughts on the governance model of Mozilla Academy.
• "Investing in Web Literacy — Tools for Thinking"(June 3) -- Ben Moskowitz -- a mental model to think about, map and understand user capabilities.
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