Peter Levy Interview Notes - September 18, 2009

Conducted with Erhardt Graeff and Carolina Rossini in person at the Berkman Center on September 18, 2009, discussing Curriki's approach to OER.

Interviewee

• Peter Levy
  • Strategic Partnerships, Curriki
  • Email: plevy [at] curriki [dot] org

Questions

• Sustainability -> Toward traditional publishing model
• Follow up to discussion of Future of OER
• How can our research and connections help facilitation greater partnering between OER projects and/or with traditional publishers?

Notes

• PETER on OER: “It's got to exist and its got to be easy to use or nobody will use it”
• ASIDE: Peter's slide deck is for content partners

Intro to Curriki

• Spun out 3.5 years ago from Sun Microsystems (largely funded personally by Scott McNealy)
• All code is LPGL, all content is CC-BY
• First/Largest OER project in K-12
• Tests show that standards-based curriculum push students to score better on standardized tests--does not apply to supplementary materials.
• There is not going to be any
• Legislation in Indiana for public textbook dollars to be used for electronic resources
• Texas is now allowing e-Textbooks to go through adoption process
• Gov. Perry signed new law to liberalize how textbook dollars are spent
• THE Journal, Geoff Fletcher has been covering this
• CAN INTERVIEW HIM via Peter Levy

Curriki Statistics

• 85,000 registered members
• 31,000+ assets (ranges in size from whole course to individual worksheet)
• PBS Newshour, Sesame Workshop, and more
• Assets will double in next year if trends continue
• HuffPost blog on OpenTech by Curriki to start Monday

Content shared by...

• For-profit pubishers
• Non-profit publishers/organizations
• School districts/regional organizations
• Ministries of education
• Schools of education
• The global community of educators

Community Activity/Editing

• About 10% of community is very involved
• Within 24 hours of posting, a human checks uploaded content for being appropriate
• Then a subject content expert reviews material (search by topics for things that have already been reviewed)

Future Developments

• To deal with interoperability: plug into LMS

  LMS would manage different formats and different content licenses

• Curriki is putting together a module for teachers to learn how to use and participate in OER (professional development ?)

Philosophy

• Curriki is about creating high organized database of content and displaying it (not set up to provide an interactive interface) -- VidiTalk allows for video use -- but its about displaying database content
• The point is not building these kind of sites, but going into schools and getting teachers to use this (OER) content/contribute.

Sustainability

• “Honestly, I think that sustainability is still a giant question mark”
• Outside of very big donors like Hewlett or Scott McNealy, Curriki is not sustainable

Here is the ‘learn list’

• If you don’t like the this then try this alternative
  • Asst. Superintendents for Instruction, Dept. Heads
    • Job will change to curating from all different sources to provide teachers a custom selection of content that adheres to standards and fits a variety of instructional forms (interactive process)
    • Traditional publishers will have to radically change to service provision creating the interfaces and custom databases of content for each educational context (school)

OPINION: Adoption of these kind of models and OER needs to be top-down in order to truly pervade industry

Some community member gave Curriki

• If you are approved on one standard then you get listed as “approved”
• Find out actual adoption of CK-12 books (no one is adopting these books, no one is even talking about them)
  • Continue Education Credit through Foothill College for learning instructional design in under to evaluate existing Curriki content and improve them
  • INCENTIVIZE GETTING INVOLVED WITH OER THROUGH PUBLIC FUNDING (LIBERALIZATION)

Professional leadership in education program at Harvard

Discourse about how curriculum mandates standards are a barrier to adoption of open models / not Flickr,

• Test-based versus learning-based

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