A library, a study mode, and a gift

Open Knowledge is an open-source application (MIT license) that publishes a library of courses: knowledge someone has curated, organized into a deliberate learning path, and offered openly on the web. This first lesson walks through what that actually feels like, on both sides of the page.

What the learner experiences

• A catalog worth browsing. Cover-art-first course cards, free-text search, and filters by language and category. The interface itself speaks thirteen languages; each course declares the language it is written in, and the catalog filters by it — so a library can serve several language communities at once without mixing them up.
• Everything is open to read. Every course can be studied completely without registering — in the spirit of a public library. No teaser chapters, no "sign up to continue". Your reading position and completed materials are remembered by your own browser.
• A study mode built for focus. One material at a time, careful long-form typography with comfortable line lengths, an always-visible sense of where you are — section, position, progress — and continue-where-you-left-off, like a book that remembers your page. Completion works the way a book does, too: moving forward marks the page read, and a quiet check lets you override it either way.
• Materials in four shapes. Text lessons written in Markdown, audio, video, and exams. The pedagogical order is the author's: materials are meant to be walked in sequence, and the interface makes the path obvious without ever locking doors.
• Exams that teach rather than grade. After each answer you see why it was right or wrong. This is not a stylistic choice; it is one of the most robust findings in learning science. Retrieval practice — being made to recall something, then getting immediate corrective feedback — strengthens memory far more than re-reading (psychologists call it the testing effect). Question pools draw a random subset per attempt, so checking your understanding twice is not an exercise in memorizing an answer key.
• Credit where due. Each course declares its authorship, bibliography and content license — and, always visibly, whether AI assisted in producing it.
• Comfort everywhere. Mobile-first design, light and dark themes, and whole-course export to EPUB and PDF for offline reading.

What the publisher experiences

For you — the person with knowledge worth sharing — Open Knowledge is a tool that takes either a folder of Markdown and JSON files, or the content of a small database managed through a friendly admin panel, and turns it into everything described above with no further effort. The reading experience, the exams, the translations, the theming: already built. Your job is the part only you can do — curating knowledge worth sharing and ordering it so it teaches.

One application, two very different ways to run it. That choice — static content mode versus database mode — is the subject of the rest of this course. The short version: static mode is a library as a published artifact, database mode is a library as a living institution. Both serve readers identically; they differ in what the library remembers.