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Written by Neeru Khosla
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Sunday, 07 March 2010 19:03 |
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“Never let schooling interfere with your education”
- Mark Twain
The problem of education is not a new problem. It was present in Mark Twain's time and it is now still present in the 21st century. How many Einstein's have we lost in this mode? During my life I have the privilege to have had several educations, the one that was issued to me by the schools that I attended, the one that I sought out on my own when I found the one I was issued was lacking, and the one that came along with my role as a parent as I watched and participated in my children’s education. And, like most of you, I paid close attention, most of the time and came away with knowledge, ideas, opinions, and a perspective on the process. The most compelling perspective that I had and we probably all saferly agree on is that we can and must do better.
The educational system upon which we are building our future is inconsistent and inefficient and the result is that we quite literally waste a substantial number of our most valuable natural resources, our children.
When we do it well and there are many examples of this, we can deliver an outstanding education that understands the needs of the students, keeps them engaged and excited, and the results can be breathtaking. The tragedy of education is that, for most students, this is simply unavailable, and when we do it wrong, they can be irreversibly damaged and many will never recover. Our failure to do the best job possible with the education of all children everywhere has global implications.
We can and we must do better.
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Written by Neeru Khosla
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Sunday, 17 January 2010 00:20 |
The old Roosevelt warhouse on the edge of Corktown has the aura of a graveyard. It's as if this is the place where knowledge went to die.
Thus read the editorial story of the Detroit Public school Textbook depository that was abandoned after a fire on the third floor of the building on March 4th, 1987. The building was sold as is with all the books, many in their original wrapping. The official estimate of damage was estimated at several millions of dollars for the content alone. Not at all clear how many millions of dollars.
According to Reginald Ciokajlo, then superintendent of support services, the district was lucky that most of that year's textbooks and materials had already been delivered and none of the prinicipals had placed their orders for the next year's textbooks. School and student records going back to 1918 were destroyed.
It dawned on me that there is another world in content production that we don't often think about. For the buying institutes there are more issues than just buying and adoption of the content. This world involves - large expensive spaces to "house" textbooks, people to manage the processes involved, ensuring that we have redundancy in textbook orders - just in case........ These kinds of requirements add another huge dimension to the cost of our education system.
How many of us think about all these things? What is the reason for such redundancy?
How much money are we going to accept as spending for "redundancy"? “How could this have happen?” “Because of the fire how many children had gone without textbooks in the city?”
You may argue that this is a rare event that it does not happen very often. However, this example still gives us food for thought. It is unbelievable that, although our dependence on print may not go away, we do not take avail of the technologies that allow us to create redundancies that afford us protection from such disasters.
One can argue that there are weaknesses on both sides - the books can be destroyed easily; computers have their own problems - what happens when the computer crashes or the light goes out. It is by far easier to provide redundancy in an online system rather than the paper-based solution. For that reason alone we have to get our content online.
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Written by Neeru Khosla
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Sunday, 03 January 2010 02:54 |
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Dear Friends,
The team at CK-12 wishes you all a very happy, peaceful, and productive 2010.
We are very excited to have completed our third year. It has been a thrill as well as a period of great growth for the whole organization. We are very privileged to be part of the education community.
2009 has been a very volatile and turbulent year for many people. Unlike past disasters and calamities, last 2 years have been unique due to financial, economical, and pandemic disasters. We, at CK-12, understand and feel for everyone who has been in the middle of these challenging times.
CK-12 is committed to providing standards aligned, quality vetted, developmentally appropriate K-12 material as well as continuing to build our seed library with STEM as well as other donated domain materials. This is our way of making the world a better place. We are committed to be open to all students and teachers across the world.
Following is a short summary of our accomplishments:
1. Continuing the build out of Content Library
a. We now have domain specific teachers and professors created standards aligned, high quality, modular content for High School (HS) and Middle School (MS) in
- Math (Geometry, Calculus, Algebra 1 and 2, Trigonometry, Probability and Statistics, Math Analysis)
- Sciences (Biology, Life Science, Earth Science, Chemistry, Peoples Physics Book, Basic Physics, 21st Century Physics)
- Teachers Editions (TE) for Geo, Cal, Algebra 1, Trig, Probability and Stats. Bio, Life Science, Earth Science. CK-12’s TE comprises of 7 FlexBooks each covering – Teaching tips, Common misconceptions in understanding, Problems Sets, Differentiations, Basic Assessment, Solution sets, and Other resources
b. Many partners have provided us with other subjects as well. This is a partial list
- Economics series by Bucks Institute
- Human Biology (HumBio Series) by Craig Heller and Mary Kiely of Stanford University
- English Composition book by San Jose State under the leadership of Professor Linda Mitchell
- Shelly Goldman's MS Math
- A Basic English Speller
- High Tech High Math problem sets book
- Nanosense from SRI
- Virtual Chemistry
2. Ongoing functional enhancements and future technological directions
- Flippo (online reader) with abilities for note taking, highlighting, sharing
- Video as well as other multimedia embedding
- Moodle (Learning Management System) Integration
- Extended Document Type support for converting word documents to our internal representation for automated conversion of all your Word documents to FlexBooks
- More print templates
- A new architecture for more finer grain size so that we can find functions other than chapters
3. Partnerships – we are partnering with many institutes and organizations to bring forth more content
- High Tech High
- Project Algebra from Robert Mosses’ group
- An updated Hum Bio Program for middle school with interactive Flash-based units from Stanford
- History book written by Ph D students both a US History primary source book, as well as an upcoming World History book
- An English Composition book from San Jose State professor Linda Mitchell by Mid February
- Translation in Spanish of the books recommended by the CA Free digital textbooks initiative by students and professors University in El Salvador
- Addition to the Contemporary Physics book by other authors in Virginia
- Arizona State University for developing an pre-algebra and algebra standard
- Khan Academies to embed video explanations of problems
- Geogebra to provide the ability to interactively demonstrate mathematical explanations
- Pilot study on 6 books from CK-12 with 6 Charter schools
We have done a lot but need to do even more. We want to make sure that what we are doing is of value to you and your community. In order to provide productive tools we need to hear from you, the users. Not only do we need to hear from you more importantly we love to hear from you. User response is the number one thing that tells us as to how you are responding to the CK-12 content and tools.
We appreciate the well wishes and constructive feedback from users who value our work and encourage us to go on. It is our reason for being who we are.
Wishing for a year of peace and love of learning for all.
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Written by Neeru Khosla
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Tuesday, 01 December 2009 22:40 |
Never before has so much money been made available to reenergize the public school educational system; however, Race to the Top (RTTT) is a double-edged sword. On one side, the reality is that billions of dollars can make a difference. The funds could drive much needed innovation to reengage students, particularly in STEM subjects. Yet, on the other side, we need to remain cognizant that this well intentioned effort could yield unforeseen and unintended consequences. The one that worries me most is that all this hoopla may derail educators, schools, and districts from doing what they need to do for current students. Will the present generation have to pay for the good of future generations as some educators claim?
RTTT criteria focus on tangible data to prove success. Adding exemplary teachers, leaders, and turning around low performing schools moves it away from simply quantitative evaluation. Do we really think that this will happen overnight? We have been struggling to improve the current system for a long time. What will ensure that these factors will improve this time? And how will we deal with the confusion that will ensue while we are testing the success of the outcomes?
In reality, given the time frame of the race, without providing a reflective and thoughtful planning process, many educators and administrators feel that they are not ready or qualified to take part in the race. Many states do not feel that they can take part in RTTT as the rules and regulations of their states do not fall within the requirements of RTTT. Many states, such as California, are trying to pass legislation that will allow the state to change so RTTT requirements can be met. Requirements such as allowing student data to be attached to teacher performance will hopefully bring accountability. Some states, the latest one being Nevada, has decided to opt out of the race as they cannot change their regulations. California, for one, with its deficit of billions of dollars cannot afford to pass when handouts are given to them.
The elephant in the room worrying many is what happens once the money dries up? Will the Feds keep supplying the yearly maintenance funds that are needed to the educational agencies? Or better still, since education is the responsibility of the states, can we insist that they now raise their own funds?
There are many reasons not to do the race. Yet can we afford not to take on the challenge to make improvements? The time has come for educators to be willing and daring to take bold steps towards changing the way they educate. It’s worth the risk!
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Written by Emily Wenner
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Saturday, 31 October 2009 16:27 |
I have been reading as many articles about digital textbooks as I can get my hands on, reading about the perceived pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages to distributing learning material via the web, or a USB drive, or a DVD. When I came to work at CK-12 I was excited about the idea, and especially about CK-12’s books being free to access and printable at cost. Over the past 18 months I have become a true believer and advocate of digital learning materials, particularly those available under an open license, such as CC-By-SA. On one hand I can understand the reticence to accept a “free” and “digital” book. For many people just one of these terms automatically connotes poor quality, forget combining the two. But there are countless educators, developers and pioneers dedicated to making high quality free, digital textbooks, including CK-12. Our July newsletter included an interview with Annamaria Farbizio and Juli Weiss. Annamaria is CK-12’s Math Editor and Leader, and Juli is our Science Editor and Leader. Gil Hoskins, Curriculum Alignment Specialist, and Gary Clarke, Content Manager, round out the CK-12 Content Team with Neeru Khosla as the team leader. This group of people works tirelessly to hire experts in math and science, teachers who hold master’s degrees or PhDs in their fields. You can read about them here. In a recent Washington Post article, Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers’ school division said, “Keep in mind that with open-source materials, you have to ask, 'Where are they coming from?' Is it a trusted source? Is it aligned to state standards? Is it based on real research?’ There can be quite a difference of content and accuracy [between free digital textbooks and traditional textbooks]. In many cases, you get what you pay for." Here are our answers to Mr. Diskey’s questions:
- Where are they coming from? CK-12’s textbooks come as donations from universities, such as Arizona State University’s high school level engineering textbook, written by professors in their engineering department. They also come from expert volunteers, such as retired NASA engineer Jim Batterson, who together with former teacher and CK-12’s Partner Relations Manager Holland Lincoln, and the State of Virginia, created the 21st Century Physics FlexBook. Virginia commissioned that updated FlexBook to supplement the traditional publishers’ out-of-date texts. FlexBooks are also commissioned by CK-12, created by teachers who have at least five years experience in their subject, many of whom hold master’s degrees and PhDs in their subjects.
- Is it a trusted source? CK-12’s books are as good as the experts we work with to create them. We consider college professors, teachers, NASA engineers and PhDs to be trusted sources.
- Is it aligned to state standards? When CLRN evaluated CK-12’s FlexBook for alignment to state standards, none of our books scored below 83%, though most scored closer to 100% for alignment to California’s state standards. In contrast, Pearson’s traditional biology textbook met 46% of California’s biology standards. Source: http://www.clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm
- Is it based on real research? In a word, yes. CK-12’s author, editor and reviewer community are highly trained experts in their fields.
CK-12 is here for the good of the students. We are excited about lightening the load they carry to school, allowing their teachers to customize their materials, and making free and digital synonymous with high quality, up-do-date, and customizable in the world of textbooks.
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Doris Kraus
Chemistry - Kinetic Molecular Theory
