Anne Schreiber Interview Notes - August 27, 2009

From Commons Based Research
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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


Navigation

Back to Contacts for EM
Back to Educational Materials

Retrieved from "http://cyber.harvard.edu/commonsbasedresearch/?title=Anne_Schreiber_Interview_Notes_-_August_27,_2009&oldid=3822"