Neeru Khosla Interview Notes - September 4, 2009

Conducted with Erhardt Graeff via telephone on September 4, 2009, concerning CK-12 Foundation's work and philosophy.

Interviewee

• Neeru Khosla
  • Co-Founder and Executive Director, CK-12 Foundation
  • Email: neeru [at] ck12 [dot] org

AND

• Murugan Pal
  • Co-Founder and President, CK-12 Foundation

Notes

ASIDE: CK-12 sees themselves as very new on the scene.

Education Issues/Philosophy

• Cost is so great in Education
• K-12 is driven by several things: standards is one of them (50 different sets) - large issue for anyone to tackle
• Our approach is distribution of information (smaller part of a bigger picture)?
• Technology is really far behind
• Structure provided by schools to make this learning happen
• Integration of technology lags behind in education
• Trying to create a system that can evolve based on what you need
• Help train our students that is part of the movement that goes all over the world

All of the content we have created are hired teachers that have significant experience in the

• We have the teachers review the content (domain experts)
• Hired high school students over the summer to look at FlexBooks

Tracking Success

• Three cases
  • Provide standards-aligned textbook substitute
  • Provide java applet to supplement contentious
  • Feedback cycle with the students
• 1st and 2nd cases are in progress
• Which states can use our books?
  • 1st success: California Initiative?

    CK-12 was newest kid on block, oer or traditional, and scored very highly

  • 2nd success: Virginia/NASA adoption of Physics FlexBook

    13 professors and scientists

• High School adoption process in California = more flexible ?

CK-12's Real Goal is Distributing Information

• Standards-alignment is only the initial goal for CK-12
• We would now like to go and create different textbooks for different students
  • Languages / ESL
  • At the end of the day we would like to make all available
  • Starting with standards-aligned curriculum, move toward providing information in all these forms

Sustainability

• Must provide locked versions of standards approved content
• Community portal would allow for community reading and reviews

  Paths - math people come together, bio people come together

Content Providers

• Non-profit, free projects like Project Algebra are developing content for CK-12
• Look at OER funding from Hewlett Foundation and others
• Each chapter is authored by a different author

  Maybe move to lesson plan level, quiz level to crowd-source those materials

• Currently working on Teacher Editions of FlexBooks

Partnerships are Really Missing in OER

• All have different licenses

  CK-12 has CC-BY-SA

• Platforms are not interoperable
• Hard to grab content when you don't know what the license might be (taking things from Connexions)

Publishers are Still Trying to Figure out their Next Steps

• Have had several meetings with Pearson
• Ask 'what can we do together?'
• Assessment and Professional Development?

Reason for CC-BY-SA License

• Want to be non-profit and endorse CC
• Non-derivative and non-commercial: want things to be remixed and has no problem promotion of material that is for-profit
• Share-Alike: Open-Source licenses have been very successful (GPL), philosophy of giving material and someone improving should be replicated in a similarly participatory way
  • NSF funding, donated content, we don't want Pearson to take book and improve material and then copyright it as their own (not SA)
  • 19 books donated to CK-12, 90% stipulated that they wanted a SA license

Favorable Policies

• OER should be treated as a serious proposition
• Looking at Hewlett's work is that it funds something gets it started and if it doens't go anywhere, then they don't fund it anymore
• OER takes it a long time to gain acceptance!!
• Policy should treat OER seriously and fund it at a public level
• K-12 standards for OER / need quality control that embrace OER as well
• Funding allotments for EM should include printing costs for things like FlexBooks
• Professors need more creative tenure track options (contribute to OER)
• Want information available

Future of EM Market

• Publishers should have almost a social obligation to keep providing textbooks/educational content
  • The model has to change / sales and marketing should not be 50/60% of the cost of a textbook
  • OER doesn't need marketing plan (REALLY?)
• If publishers can think about not having to be like a big business
• Online assessment and professional development to support OER content

Comparisons

• Textbooks being used
• Policy level: What works in education?
  • Might have to take different aspects of education separately in different contexts
  • One agency to do all aspects of education process: Assessment, ProDev, etc.

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