Anne Schreiber Interview Notes - August 27, 2009

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Conducted with Erhardt Graeff and Carolina Rossini via telephone on August 27, 2009, concerning Curriki's core content strategy and new content standards.

Interviewee

Notes

General

  • Anne has a publishing background, previously worked at McGraw-Hill

California Digital Textbook Initiative

  • Everything happened so quickly
  • Curriki didn't take the 7 days to review their materials when the review committee got back to them
  • Was eye-opening because Curriki thought they were further along than they were

Partnering with other Organizations

  • Success so far with small publishers and governmental orgs who are put chunks of their content on the Curriki platform as PR for them; they also choose (non-derivative) open licenses
  • Pearson has been the real success in opening dialogue with us
    • Generally, finding a monetizable model has been a real struggle for traditional publishers
    • Scholastic open publishing project is a good start (i.e. Open Book Initiative ?)

Considerations for Content Standards

  • Must be modular in approach (modularizing and metatags of all content)
    • CK-12 / Curriki doing “playlists” of educational content
    • Licensing little bits and pieces of stuff and selling it is not where people/orgs are at yet
  • We are seeing a lot of change in the this area
    • Illinois just changed their textbook adoption policy
    • Everything in K-12/HE Education has a 5 year lag
  • Connect digital level assessments to digital content (is considered the next 'holy grail')
    • Assessment: written or digital assessment for student levels and then immediately applying that to the teaching strategy
    • No one has succeeded in doing this
    • Modularizing content could make this process more automated for each chunk of content, maybe consolidated on an LMS
    • Endeavor is big and expensive: publishers are better positioned to do this

Quality issue between Textbooks vs OER

  • Publishers still believe that content should not be free
    Still feel that they have the dominance on good quality content because of good authors + best consumable product form
  • 'Open Community' believes that delivery method doesn't matter but that the community is best expert to crowdsource content
    • Best Models (Anne thinks): merging crowdsourcing + expert oversight (e.g. NROC)
    • Open source licensing available
    • Way to develop this is very much a traditional publishing model
    • FWK is a great example of this (people working for free and producing high quality product)

Myth of Organic Collaboration

  • CASE: Six professors have been working with Curriki to produce a high quality course
    • Professors were stipended and Anne had to direct the project
    • Wouldn't have happened 'organically'
  • Anne wants to believe there is an organic collaboration process
    • BUT, she believes there really needs to be an organized effort
    • Curriki has not seen an organic collaboration process emerge on their platform
  • CASE: Curriki has a project in Europe using 'federated' version of the platform
    Internationalizing the content into the various languages
  • A few schools have started to use the site in an organic way for various reasons
    • See TappedIn -- now defunct
    • KEY INSIGHT: People come together and crowd-source for a very specific purpose (fulfill the need and then leave) - do not stay on site and generally contribute
  • We are interested in seeing what people are doing with content
    • Needed to first seed the database with content to get people to work on stuff
    • ”People move in baby steps”
    • Internal research Rice/Connexions shows same situation (very little mixing and matching was happening on the Connexions) - a lot of people saving their work but not re-editing (not an iterative model)
      Curriki has been seeing the same behavior
    • Now people are adding, rating (starring things), but it is extremely rare that people make major contributions to other people's started projects
  • KEY INSIGHT: K-12 teacher culture is not about allowing another teacher to come into a classroom and tell them how they might do it differently
    There is no real-life analog for what we are trying to do on Curriki

Contacts

Peter Levy, Strategic Partnerships @ Curriki


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