CK 12 Foundation

Founders

Neeru Khosla, Executive Director and Co-Founder of CK-12 Foundation, holds a bachelor's degree from Delhi University/San José State and a master's degree in Molecular Biology from San José State. She received her second master's degree from Stanford University. Murugan Pal, Co-Founder, & President of CK-12 Foundation until his passing in 2012, was a serial entrepreneur based in the Silicon Valley.

History

Neeru Khosla teamed with her husband, Vinod Khosla, to think about how to make a positive impact in the educational sphere. Together, they decided to try to revolutionize the way students interface with textbooks, which can be burdensome, expensive, and slow to update. Neeru chose to focus in particular on high school and middle school students and teachers, most notably in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Neeru found an enabling partner in Murugan Pal, whose strong technical and entrepreneurial skills helped the CK-12 idea manifest into a not-for-profit educational organization. She then recruited teachers from all across America to author CK-12 textbooks, to be published under Creative Commons licenses. Explaining why she chose to provide open-source and collaborative content, Neeru says, “We can’t make all kids get an education, but we can make it simpler, easier, and more affordable. That’s the philosophy behind the openness as far as I’m concerned."

The "C" in CK-12 originally stood for "connect", indicating that the material was the missing connection in K-12 education. The company's website now states that the C has an open meaning, and can stand for "content, classroom, customizable, connections, collaboration—the idea is that our content can be used by anyone, anywhere for free."

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

FlexBook System

The FlexBook System is an online platform for assembling, authoring, and distributing interactive, multi-modal educational content. Content is searchable by subject, grade-level, and state and national education standards. FlexBooks can be downloaded and used as-is, or can be customized by teachers to match their students’ learning styles and their schools’ curricula. Inside each book, entire chapters or bite-sized concepts can be rearranged, added, removed, and edited. Any user can input text, photos, videos, exercises, study guides, assessments, notes, or highlights to their FlexBook. FlexBooks can be shared, for free, with user-created groups in print, online, by email, or on social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. Some Flexbooks are even available in Spanish and Hindi.

All FlexBooks conform to national and state curriculum guidelines, Common Core Standards, and can be re-aligned to International standards. Flexbooks are offered under the Creative Commons by Attribution, Share-alike, and Non-commercial license, removing many of the restrictions that limit distribution of traditional textbooks. Most CK-12 FlexBooks are created internally by authors with teaching and domain expertise. Additional FlexBooks are acquired through university donations and licensing partnerships. CK-12’s current library of 88 downloadable Flexbooks can be accessed in PDF, ePub, and Amazon Kindle optimized format.

The technologies used in creation of CK-12 FlexBooks are:

Concept-based and multi-modal learning

CK-12 organizes its educational content into roughly 5000 concepts (e.g., "Two digit multiplication" or "Photosynthesis" or "Newton’s law"). CK-12 believes that these “Byte-Sized” units of content and modalities of learning (as well as varied styles of learning) are more important tools for facilitating learning than traditional educational materials like textbooks. These concepts are further organized into "Learning Paths."

Ck-12 content is available in a number of formats, which the organization describes as multiple “modalities of the concept.” Each modality is defined as “a different way to learn or explore” a specific concept and its relationship to other concepts. Examples include, but are not limited to:

1. Textual descriptions
2. Video lectures
3. Supplementary videos
4. Multimedia simulations
5. Interactive exploration models
6. Quizzes/exams and question banks
7. Examples of the concept in real-life use
8. Maps of related concepts
9. Web resources related to the concept
10. Galleries of photographs
11. Peer learning
12. Labs or other experiments
13. Flash cards
14. Lesson plans

Other products

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

In the future, CK-12 intends to expand its offerings by continuing to produce its own content, but also by asking for contributions from its active, engaged community. CK-12 will continue to match its content to an expanding base of learning standards like McREL Compendium.

Recognition