Conducted with Carolina Rossini via phone on March 25, 2009; notes were taken by Erhardt Graeff

Interviewee

Jonathan Emmons
Community Development Specialist, Connexions
Phone: (713) 348 - 2392
Email: jonathan [dot] emmons [at] cnx [dot] org

Notes

What actors do you know of in EM industry?

States make textbook decisions at high-level, limiting choices when they reach the schools

“Here are two or three approved history textbooks, pick one.”
“Market will self-select to tailor to these decisions”
Publishers are savvy to what the main states will select
The other 47 states will fall into line because they don’t have many options available to them

Publishers are not going to produce 50 different books; they are going to go with as few books as possible.

K-12 Textbook Selection in Brazil		K-12 Textbook Selection in US
Each school decides on state-level school curriculum. Government hires consultants to confront publishers with requirements and shop around for contracts, which are sold at discount to public schools to distribute free to student.	vs.	Publishers in US create their own textbook based on need to produce (supply/demand) and then go to state education boards (main ones) to verify quality of books against standards. Then list of approved books are handed down to school districts (SD's) in that state. Then the SD's look at list and decide based on price, what used before, etc. and then make purchases for their districts from that list. The books are then lended to students for the year of their coursework. (Jonathan's experience growing up in Texas)

Publisher distribution of K-12 market? Big ones?

Ash-Mussly (spell?), Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill
- ERHARDT COMMENT: Check list on Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Shopping_and_Services/Publishers/Education/Textbooks/K_12/)
More likely specialized publishers (from big companies) for colleges
K-12 are more likely directly under big publishers names

Other Alt Business Models?

Connexions long-term strategy: leverage tools like underlying CMS (in-house written open-source software) and sell that software to corporations who want to have a proprietary content system for their information sharing (like Red Hat selling service on open source software)
- Use software to pay the bills of the non-profit to keep it open and ad-free

Connexions content is primarily for higher education

Partnership: South African school adopting full K-12 curriculum from Connexions modules