Anne Schreiber Interview Notes - August 27, 2009

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

Interviewee

• Anne Schreiber
  • Chief Academic Officer, Curriki
  • Email: aschreiber [at] curriki [dot] org

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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