CK-12 Foundation

Last updated
CK12 Foundation
Founded2007
FoundersNeeru Khosla and Murugan Pal
Focus Education
Location
Area served
Global
MethodDonations and Grants
Key people
 Neeru Khosla, executive director
Murugan Pal, President
Miral Shah, CTO
Website https://www.ck12.org
Headquarters location [1]

The CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization which aims to increase access to low-cost K-12 education in the United States and abroad. [2] CK-12 provides free and customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards. As of 2022, the foundation's tools were used by over 200,000,000 students worldwide. [2]

Contents

CK-12 was set up to support K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. It first produced content via a web-based platform called "FlexBook." [3] [4]

History

CK-12 was established in 2007 by Neeru Khosla and Murugan Pal as a not-for-profit educational organization. [5] Teacher-generated content was initially made available under Creative Commons Attribution licenses so as to make it simpler, easier, and more affordable for children to access educational resources. [6] [7] However, they later switched to a Creative Commons Non Commercial licence, [8] and then to their own "CK-12" license. [9]

Originally, the "C" in CK-12 stood for "connect", indicating that the material was the missing connection in K-12 education. Subsequently, it took on a more open meaning, variously standing for "content, classroom, customizable, connections, collaboration". [10]

In 2010, NASA teamed up with CK-12 to produce physics-related resources. [11]

In March 2013, Microsoft announced a partnership with CK-12 to provide content to Microsoft's Windows 8 customers. [12]

FlexBook System

The foundation's FlexBook website permits the assembly and creation of downloadable educational resources, which can be customized to meet classroom needs. Some FlexBooks are also available in Spanish and Hindi. Content is offered under a Creative Commons license, removing many of the restrictions that limit distribution of traditional textbooks, and are available in various formats. [13] [14]

Approach

The CK-12 Foundation's approach to supporting education in schools is by providing it as small, individual elements, rather than as large textbooks. As of 2012, some 5,000 individual elements were available in various formats such as textual descriptions, video lectures, multi-media simulations, photo galleries, practical experiments or flash cards. [15]

Other products

In addition to its 88 FlexBooks, the CK-12 Foundation also offers the following online resources to K-12 students:

Recognition

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIT OpenCourseWare</span> Web-based publication of MIT course content

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Textbook</span> Type of academic study book

A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print and digital formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikibooks</span> Free resource library of books

Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

Openness is an overarching concept that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

Connexions, later known as OpenStax CNX was a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform was provided and maintained by OpenStax, which is based at Rice University. The collection was available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and was available for download in various digital formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David A. Wiley</span>

David A. Wiley is an American academic, writer who is the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, education fellow at Creative Commons, and former adjunct faculty of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, where he was previously an associate professor. Wiley's work on open content, open educational resources, and informal online learning communities has been reported in many international outlets, including The New York Times, The Hindu, MIT Technology Review, and Wired.

An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Nonrestrictive creative work

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.

An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neeru Khosla</span> Co-founder of the CK12 Foundation

Neeru Khosla is the co-founder and chair of the non-profit CK12 Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knewton</span>

Knewton is an adaptive learning company that has developed a platform to personalize educational content as well as has developed courseware for higher education concentrated in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The company was founded in 2008 by Jose Ferreira, a former executive at Kaplan, Inc. The Knewton platform allows schools, publishers, and developers to provide adaptive learning for any student. In 2011, Knewton announced a partnership with Pearson Education to enhance the company's digital content, including the MyLab and Mastering series. Additional partners announced include Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan Education, Triumph Learning, and over a dozen others.

Teachinghistory.org, also known as the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC), is a website that provides educational resources for the study of U.S. history.

The Saylor Academy, formerly known as the Saylor Foundation, is a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC. It was established in 1999 by its sole trustee, Michael J. Saylor. Since 2008, the focus of the foundation has been its Free Education Initiative which has led to the creation of 241 courses representing 10 of the highest enrollment majors in the US.

FlexBook is a textbook authoring platform developed by the CK-12 Foundation launched in 2008, focused on textbooks for the K-12 market. Derived from the words "flexibility" and "textbook," a FlexBook allows users to produce and customize content by re-purposing educational content using different modules. FlexBooks can be designed to suit a learner's learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education</span> 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2002. Located in Half Moon Bay, California, its mission is to make learning and knowledge sharing participatory, equitable, and open.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OER Commons</span> Freely accessible online library

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

OpenStax is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. OpenStax's first textbook was College Physics, which was published online, in print, and in iBooks in 2012. OpenStax launched OpenStax Tutor Beta in June 2017, adaptive courseware based on cognitive science principles, machine learning, and OpenStax content. However, it was announced in October 2022 that Tutor was being discontinued.

This outline of open educational resources provides a way of navigating concepts and topics in relation to the open educational resources (OER) movement.

References

  1. ↑ Headquarters address from organization website Archived 2022-01-04 at the Wayback Machine ; 2300 Geng Rd. Suite 150, Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA. 37°26′6.11″N122°6′34.59″W / 37.4350306°N 122.1096083°W
  2. 1 2 "The reinvention of Neeru Khosla". Silicon Valley Business Journal. 2014-03-28. Retrieved 2014-04-22.
  3. ↑ Park, Jane (28 April 2009). "CK-12 Foundation's Neeru Khosla on Open Textbooks". Creative Commons. Archived from the original on 7 September 2015. Retrieved October 18, 2012.
  4. ↑ "All about FlexBooks". Archived from the original on 2012-06-09. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
  5. ↑ "Murgan Pal- Kamla Bhatt show". Archived from the original on 2011-12-21. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  6. ↑ "About The Licenses". creativecommons.org.
  7. ↑ "The "Living Book" Movement: Free Education For All". MindShift. Archived from the original on 2012-01-19. Retrieved 2011-12-12.
  8. ↑ "Attribution Guidelines | CK-12 Foundation". 2016-04-08. Archived from the original on 2016-04-08. Retrieved 2023-01-12.
  9. ↑ "Attribution Guidelines". 2022-04-21. Archived from the original on 2022-04-21. Retrieved 2023-01-12.
  10. ↑ "What Does The "C" in CK-12 Stand For?". Help Center.
  11. ↑ NASA (21 September 2010). "NASA Teams With 'CK-12' Foundation on Physics FlexBook". prnewswire.com.
  12. ↑ "Microsoft emphasizes Student Privacy, partners with Knewton, Pearson". EDUKWEST.
  13. ↑ "FlexBooks challenge textbooks". schoolingtoday.com. Archived from the original on 2011-10-22.
  14. ↑ "Assistive Technology Blog: CK-12 Provides Free Electronic Textbooks". 29 July 2011. Archived from the original on 10 September 2017. Retrieved 9 September 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  15. ↑ "CK-12 Vision document September 2012" (PDF). ck12.org. Retrieved 9 September 2023.
  16. ↑ "Braingenie". ck12.org.
  17. ↑ "America's Coolest College Start-ups 2010: Jason Shah - Harvard University - Inc.com". Inc.com.
  18. ↑ "Best Websites for Teaching & Learning 2011". ala.org. Archived from the original on 2011-07-13. Retrieved 2012-01-09.
  19. ↑ "Search Results - ED.gov:flexbook". ed.gov. Archived from the original on 2012-07-08.
  20. ↑ "Tech Awards 2010: 15 Innovations That Could Save The World (PHOTOS)". The Huffington Post. 26 September 2010.
  21. ↑ "cable green". creativecommons.org.
  22. ↑ "Startups are about to blow up the textbook". Fortune.
  23. ↑ "Temple Run Meets Algebra: CK12's New Approach". MindShift. Archived from the original on 2015-03-19. Retrieved 2013-04-29.
  24. ↑ Lewin, Tamar (8 August 2009). "In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History". The New York Times.
  25. ↑ Bill Gates. "Technology's Promise to Education: Reimagining Textbooks". thegatesnotes.com. Archived from the original on 2013-05-11. Retrieved 2013-04-29.
  26. ↑ "Cassidy: Don't bet against Neeru Khosla's idea to save our schools". mercurynews.com. 22 January 2012.
  27. ↑ "Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms?". TechCrunch. AOL. 15 January 2012.
  28. ↑ Ash, Katie (15 October 2012). "Education Week: Common Core Drives Interest in Open Education Resources". Education Week Digital Directions.
  29. ↑ "6 Reasons to Love the Textbooks from CK12". EduKindle. 25 October 2010.
  30. ↑ "Capital Area Intermediate Unit wants to test digital textbooks in midstate schools". PennLive.com. 18 February 2011.
  31. ↑ "Q&A: CK-12 Says OER & Tech Can Unlock Cheaper, Better Learning". Getting Smart. 12 April 2012.
  32. ↑ "Digital Textbooks: Has Their Time Come?". teachinghistory.org. Archived from the original on 2011-12-10. Retrieved 2012-01-09.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.