Peter Levy Interview Notes - September 18, 2009

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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

Educational Model Shift

  • Curricular options: "Here is the 'learn list'"
  • If you don’t like the this then try this alternative
    • Changing role of 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)
  • KEY OPINION: Adoption of these kind of models and OER needs to be top-down in order to truly pervade industry

California Adoption Situation and Final Thoughts

  • 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)
  • Working on Continuing Education Credit through Foothill College for learning instructional design in order to evaluate existing Curriki content and improve them
  • INCENTIVIZE GETTING INVOLVED WITH OER THROUGH PUBLIC FUNDING (LIBERALIZATION)

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