Google’s Perspective:
Google endorsed CK12’s initiative to create open educational resources (OER) for grades 5-12, aligning with their mission to make valuable information more accessible. Google promoted CK12 to their customers as Christmas/Hanukkah holiday gifts, showcasing the importance of OER.

CK12 Founders’ Background:
Nehru is actively involved in the education sector and serves as a board member of DonorsChoose, a platform for funding classroom projects. Murugan Paul, President of CK12, has a background in technology, having held CTO positions and worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins.

Vinod Khosla:
Introduction: Emphasized the need for a more flexible and adaptable model for textbooks, comparing it to iTunes or iChapters. Explained the inspiration behind CK12: a conversation with Rich Baronek, who faced high costs for photocopying class notes after Barnes and Noble took over the Rice University bookstore. Discussed the benefits of open source, including peer review, meritocracy, and continuous improvement, highlighting the success of Apache and Linux as examples. Mentioned the growing trend of user-generated content and its potential application in the context of OER.

Educational Disruption through Open Educational Resources:
Open source textbooks are challenging traditional publishing models, threatening their obsolescence. Content customization, dynamic updates, and Wikipedia-like accessibility will revolutionize education. The iTunes model, with its flexible pricing and modular structure, offers a blueprint for textbook transformation.

The Power of Customization:
Textbooks 2.0 prioritize customization, enabling tailored content for students of varying abilities. Teachers can select chapters or modules, allowing for dynamic course structures that meet individual needs. The rip, mix, burn, and share model, inspired by the music industry, encourages student engagement and active learning.

CK-12 Vision and Goals:
CK-12 envisions a collaborative, free, open, and non-profit environment for educational resources. Alignment with curriculum and state standards ensures educational relevance and usability. Shared content and resource reallocation offer significant cost savings and improved accessibility. The goal is to create flexible, high-quality textbooks that surpass commercial publisher offerings.

Collaboration and Technology:
Technology supports open educational resource development and deployment. The focus is on seeding content to showcase the quality and diversity of available resources. Collaboration happens in an open wiki-like manner, ensuring accessibility and transparency. User-friendly interfaces, similar to email editors, simplify the authoring and editing process. XML extensibility underlies the platform, enabling different manifestation formats.

Introduction of Collaborative Platform:
Created a platform that encourages collaboration and contribution. Receive donations of content, commission work, and encourage users to adapt existing content. Addressing the lack of modern engineering materials in schools, the platform offers a 9-12th-grade engineering text.

Content Quality and Collaborative Review:
Importance of content quality emphasized, especially for textbooks. Creating a shared platform that allows users to edit, review, and endorse content.

Flexible Publishing and Adaptation:
The platform allows users to create custom books by selecting specific chapters, adapting text, and publishing them on demand. Enables teachers to tailor content to specific grade levels and teaching requirements.

Architectural Principles of the Platform:
Decompose books into elemental structures, allowing users to adapt and create custom content. Open authoring encourages collaboration, while closed authoring maintains structure. Adaptive versioning supports branching and merging, similar to software code management. Contextual collation ensures that related material is grouped together. Flexible manifestation allows users to access content in various formats, including paper, mobile devices, and USB drives.

Elemental Structures:
Books are broken down into elemental structures, enabling customization. URIs represent images, media, and audio objects within the system, each with associated semantics. Elements combine text, images, and media into logical chunks, similar to HTML div structures.

Definition of a Chapter:
A chapter consists of a title, conceptual definition, overview, embedded elements, questions and reviews, and check your understanding sections. A collection of chapters forms a flex book.

Open Authoring:
Users can create and edit textbooks using email editors, word processors, or wiki interfaces. The system supports branch versioning (for collaboration) and main trunk versioning. Content can be exported as HTML or RSS feeds.

Content Harvesting:
Flexbooks can import content from open educational resources that are compatible with the Creative Commons share alike and by attribution license. Content can be pulled from websites like Wikipedia and incorporated into textbooks.

Manifestation of Textbooks:
Flexbooks can be exported as HTML, PDF, USB image, or RSS feed (called Flex Feeds). The system can generate textbooks dynamically based on user input and preferences.

Dynamic Content Search:
Users can search for specific content within CK 12 and Wikipedia. Search results can be previewed and added to textbooks with drag-and-drop functionality.

Customization and Sequencing:
Users can create custom textbooks by selecting and arranging chapters from different sources. Chapters can be easily re-sequenced by dragging and dropping.

User-Friendly Interface:
Users can create and edit textbooks without registering or logging into the system. Content can be previewed and added to textbooks before users commit to creating an account.

Introduction:
Custom books are created that are composed entirely of content from CK12 and Wikipedia.

Process:
CK12 and Wikipedia components are collated. Chapters, appendices, indices, and glossaries are combined and organized. Content is paginated to ensure a cohesive experience.

Example:
Created book includes a light chapter with information sourced from CK12, dispersion sourced from Wikipedia, magnetism sourced from CK12, and reflections sourced from Wikipedia.

Utility:
Enables the creation of custom books on a variety of subjects, such as thermodynamics, refrigeration, heat engines, and biology, on the fly. Reduces the need to purchase textbooks. Provides access to a constantly expanding pool of content as more people contribute.

Economic Benefits:
Reduced textbook costs: The OER platform offers significant economic benefits by providing textbooks at a low print cost, eliminating the need for students to purchase expensive physical textbooks. Hard-bound, color-printed textbooks: The platform produces high-quality, hard-bound textbooks at a low cost, providing students with durable and visually appealing learning materials.

Emotional Benefits:
Eliminates the burden of carrying heavy textbooks: Students no longer have to carry heavy backpacks filled with textbooks, reducing physical strain and improving overall comfort. Empowers parents to create custom learning materials: Parents can create workbooks and customized учебники materials for their children, promoting personalized learning and addressing specific educational needs.

Evolutionary Benefits:
OER as a starting point for education: The platform serves as a foundation for addressing various aspects of the educational process, such as standards, curriculum, materials, lesson plans, teaching materials, pacing, assessment, and reinforcement. Collaboration among teachers: Teachers can collaborate and share lesson plans and materials, reducing the workload for individual educators and promoting a sense of community within the teaching profession.

Adoption and Implementation:
California pilot program: The platform is currently focused on a pilot program in California, targeting charter schools, private schools, and public schools with specific demographic pain points. Focus group studies with teachers: Feedback from focus group studies with teachers indicates a positive response to the platform, with teachers expressing appreciation for the potential to reduce their workload and improve collaboration.

Open Source Textbooks:
The organization is piloting a program to create open-source textbooks in California. The goal is to make high-quality educational materials available to students worldwide, particularly in emerging economies.

Challenges in Textbook Creation:
Many teachers are not authors or subject matter experts and rely on pre-written textbooks. Inviting major authors to contribute to the platform could be a solution.

Collaborative Improvement:
Teachers can improve upon existing textbooks by modifying diagrams, paragraphs, or explanations. Only a small percentage of teachers need to contribute to significantly improve the quality of the books.

Pre-Endorsed Standard Books:
Open-source textbooks are pre-endorsed and ready-to-print, reducing the need for customization. This approach allows 95% of users to utilize pre-cut books without creating custom content.

Educational Content for All:
CK-12 aims to provide students with free, digital textbooks that are easily accessible and can be tailored to specific needs.

Versioning and Branching Simplified:
Technical terms like “versioning” and “branching” are simplified to make the platform more user-friendly for non-technical users.

Cost-Free Access and Printing:
There is no cost for teachers or users to access and print CK-12’s educational resources.

Compensation for Content Creators:
CK-12 invests half of its operations into content creation, including paying reviewers, editors, and authors.

Open-Source Content:
CK-12’s content is open-source and shared alike under Creative Commons, ensuring that it is widely available and can be improved upon by experts.

Quality Control and Review:
CK-12’s content undergoes rigorous quality control processes, with multiple experts reviewing and vetting each book.

Constant Improvement:
Teachers and users can contribute to the improvement of CK-12’s content by providing feedback, adding better diagrams, explanations, and illustrations.

Standards and Curriculum Alignment:
CK-12 collaborates with organizations to align its content with state and national standards, making it easier for teachers to meet curriculum requirements.

International Accessibility and Translation:
CK-12’s content is translated into multiple languages, expanding its reach and improving the quality of education in underserved regions.

Environmental Impact:
By reducing the need for physical textbooks, CK-12 helps to conserve resources and reduce waste.

Call for Volunteers and Collaborators:
CK-12 welcomes volunteers and collaborators from various backgrounds, including sabbatical teachers, developers, and educators, to contribute to its content and platform development.

Supporting Experienced Teachers:
CK-12 aims to provide resources and support for experienced teachers who may not need traditional textbooks but seek to share their own materials and teaching methods.

Encouraging Teacher Involvement:
CK-12 encourages teachers to contribute their own materials, lesson plans, and teaching strategies to the platform, leveraging their expertise to enhance educational content.