K12 textbook publishing challened by open curriculum trend

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Curriki Logo

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A new movement is afoot in education. Teachers and schools across the country are sharing learning resources openly and for free, and challenging traditional models of educational publishing. Spurred-on by MIT and its OpenCourseware and the initiative of foundations, the leadership of The Hewlett Foundation, higher education has moved strongly to support open curriculum. Now this movement is starting to take hold in the primary grades where a few pioneering non-profit web sites are beginning to give teachers some control over their curriculum.

In the K-12 space, two organizations in particular are blazing the trail. These site enable teachers, schools, districts and states to create and share content openly and under Creative Commons license. There are may sites such as OER Commons that allow people to share web links to free learning resource. However, this is just another way of finding things on the web. What the true innovators are doing is providing a place or teachers, educators, subject matter experts and students to build anew, collaborate openly and create textbooks and media collections tailored to their local needs.

Two great sites worth supporting are:

Videos

An Overview of Curriki - Open-Source Curricula

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sourced by jmarks

Curriki (as in Curriculum+Wiki) - Curriki allows users to to create a profile and make personal collections of resources. It is free to join and members can form or join groups to share in creating resource collections. Imagine a group of teachers sharing intervention and differentiation resources in algebra for example. Or as with the state of California, working across an entire state to develop math and science textbooks and media collections that can be used, for free, in place of expensive and limited textbooks.

CK12 - Is a site focusing on the creation of open textbooks. They allow educators to assemble content from many sources and then compile that with original material into a printable book that can be created and distributed to a single learner or an entire school or state. Where Curriki enables any type of resource such as audio, video, interactive, CK12 is trying to leverage the traditional book format.

Both Curriki and CK12 have their place and can work well together. If these and other sites can find ways to share content between each other, it won't be long before the big school book publishers find themselves carpeting with their own customers.