CK12 Non-Profit | Neeru & Vinod Khosla | Talks at Google

Nehru has been active in the education space both here in this area and more broadly. She's also a board member of DonorsChoose, which a little Google connection is that this year we gave to the majority of our customers our Christmas Hanukkah holiday gifts, where donors choose gift certificates. It's a fabulous program. If you don't know about it, go look it up. And we've seen tremendous gifts thanks from our advertisers for introducing them to something so important. And Murugan Paul is the president of CK12. So he's running this noble effort, a role he assumed after a long career in technology, both stints as a CTO and as an entrepreneur in residence at Kleiner Perkins. So I guess it's not too hard to figure out how this group met each other. I've had the opportunity to meet with Nehru and Margon on this interest in this organization and they're doing something really important, we believe, and certainly very core to what Google believes is important, which trying to take information which has been costly to develop and costly to deliver information that's important to people. And this is educational information for grades 5 through 12 and use the power of what is humanity to create this in a much more open way. So I'm going to let them talk to you about this initiative and we thank them for joining us.

Thanks. Cheryl Morgan and Neeru are doing most of the work, so they should be talking, but I'll introduce it and then hand it over to them. Thanks everybody for coming. This is a new effort. I think all of us know about textbooks 1.0. Many of you have seen them. Rigid, heavy, monolithic textbooks. I'm sure you've seen them. Very little of the money from these goes to authors. Most of it goes to production of stuff that's not used. And most importantly, they're relatively inflexible in adapting to a class or a student or a course curriculum that a teacher wants. What we need really is the model of itunes or ichapters. But even before going that one of the key stories behind starting this is a conversation we had with Rich Beronick, who started Connections, which is trying to do the same thing for college courses. Rich had a set of class notes that he used to hand out till Barnes Noble took over the Rice University bookstore and suddenly photocopies of his class notes cost $120. That is the problem with textbooks. And so open source textbooks was an idea that was born then. Let's see, how are we doing? I don't have to say much about the open source movement here. But all of you know much about this, about the peer review models, the meritocracy models and the participation. The model in open source is you start with something that's good enough and it gets better. And most importantly, it keeps getting better. As you know, there's very few products as good as Apache and Linux today. Today mostly because of this participation in continuous and continual improvement. The second phenomena we've seen recently and here everybody's seen it on lots of different forums is user generated content. I don't think again it's something new or different. But we'll talk about how this gets applied to Textbooks and Textbooks 2.0. You know, it's Walter Isaacson, who used to be editor of Time magazine, had a debate with me probably only about three years ago where he said I can't rely on the content on the net, I have to go to cnn. And I argued that CNN was never going to be current and have enough information. This is another manifestation. Clearly today YouTube's at least as much reach as CNN in why the old models are dying. CNN in fact has succumbed to this and now CNN Ireport is trying to use user generated content. Beyond user generated content is all the knowledge portals moving up the chain. It started with source code to journalism and reporting and to knowledge portals. In fact, all of us know about Wikipedia and the comparisons between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. What's most impressive to me is how much more dynamic Wikipedia is for almost any topic, no matter how esoteric. It's the only place you can get information almost instantaneously on portals like Vicky, how you can even learn how to scramble eggs in a microwave. There's sort of every topic is covered. So the new set of things around what is starting to happen is the Creative Coppins license and its application into open educational resources, which is what CK12 is all about. There are successful examples. I've talked about connections that's out of Rice University for, for college curriculum, MIT, OpenCourseWare and others. So. What we need is the itunes model in course curriculum. And you have to really look at it from the student's point of view and the teacher's point of view because very seldom is a whole textbook taught. If albums are broken down into songs, we should be breaking books down into chapters or maybe even smaller modules. We shouldn't have to pay for all the things we don't need. But even more importantly, as we've seen with music, it's rip, mix and burn. I sort of call this generation of Kids, the mixed generation, I mean, they can't imagine music any other way. And I don't see why education shouldn't be the same way. And I'll talk about some of these pressing needs. The next step, and technology enables more and more over time is this idea of print on demand. McGraw Hill has McGraw Hill here, McGraw Hill Singapore and a different TADA, McGraw Hill in India because they have an old model. What we need is this print on demand model. Print only what you need if you need to print it at all. Not only that, as you start to think about it, once you get into this model, you start to get a level of flexibility that's very hard to imagine. So if you look what textbook 2.0 would be like. Teachers teaching a class of 50 students or 30 students in a physics course. I want, if I'm an A student, really detailed textbook. If I'm a C student, I really want pictorials in physics. And that level of customization is not possible. So today everybody gets taught at one level with one textbook. Problem 5.2 could be different for different students at different levels. And that level of customization is the next level beyond just sort of printing just the chapters or modules you want. That's what textbook 2.0 is about. It's about rip mix, burn rate, share. It's about Wikipedia and itunes and Blurb and Netflix and MySpace and everything we've learned in each of those models combined for education. And of course it's disintermediation leading to disruption. I have to tell you a funny story. It was a few years ago I was asked by one of the large media company CEOs to come give a talk on the Internet to their off site senior staff meeting. And I was thinking of something creative to say because I don't want to repeat what everybody else has said. So I took the example of open source textbooks and I said, this is why I think textbook. I knew they had a textbook publishing business would go out of business. And the CEO of the textbook business got up and said to me, you mean you're really going to obsolete us? Can this really happen? And I knew from how concerned she was that it actually can happen. So that's where the idea was born. It's flexible, it's customized, it's improving, it's locally oriented, and probably most importantly, once you have a lot of content, you can filter it to local standards. So it should be easy for a California teacher to meet all the physics curriculum requirements to California curriculum standards. So these are just filters layered on Top of the content. In some ways this is different than Wikipedia. It's not completely open source because it has to meet certain curricular standards, but it's relatively simple to do with technology. And that's where this idea of textbooks 2.0 was born, how it got defined. So the CK12 vision, and I'll pass it on to Morgan here very quickly, is a collaborative environment, free and open. It's a nonprofit, it's aligned with curriculum, it has to meet state curriculum standards. And you can do textbooks that are much better than what the state wants, but they won't be used. You have to meet curriculum standards. It's customized, of course, so I want the bottom of the font's getting cut off, but you get the idea. So that is in fact the vision of CK12. Let me talk very briefly about the goals. It's very simple, flexible textbooks that meet minimum quality standards. And there the process here is more complex that you might see on Wikipedia because there is a level of standards and review that is needed to meet state standards. So not everything is the same, but there's a lot of leverage from the models. It's of course shared content, reallocating resources. Just in California alone, every year we spend $600 million on textbooks for K12. That's funding that could be freed up and it's billions and billions of dollars nationwide that could be freed up while making the content better and more accessible and more customizable. That's really the power of the vision here. Less money, lot more utility, lot better textbooks. Initially they probably need to match what's available from commercial post publishers, but over time they will get substantially better. They will get substantially more diverse. So a C student and an A student can read different things to explain the same subject matter and the same curriculum requirement and they'll be slightly different in California versus Texas to meet local standards at this point. Let me ask Morgan to come up and go into a little more of the details.

Thank you, Vinod. So let's actually jump into it. What are our plan of action? So currently we are focusing on two main things as actually as you see, technology is an enabler for many of these things and we are focusing on technology and also we are focusing on seeding the contents in order to bring back and showcase to the people that actually there are good contents that can be delivered. There are books that are much more qualified than what is available today in the industry. Actually we brought those books here. So if you want to actually see how this printed books, the customized printed books, how they tangibly look and feel. And this is not much different from any other standard book that you would go buy today. A fifth grade science book cost around $80. And if you see the definition of relative humidity in it, it's not better than what you would find it in an open educational resource website. Okay, so what we are focusing on is that. And also this is A K through 12 audience. So we wanted to make sure the collaboration happens in a very open way, just like in a wiki. And then the application has to be as simple as like an email editor. Because The K through 12 audience is not going to be very much, you know, they do not have time and energy to catch up with, you know, advanced interfaces and those kind of stuff. And also the whole thing needs to be manifested in different formats. Actually you would see, we will talk about different levels of manifestation. So that means XML type extensibility needs to be underneath. So if you are going to see the underneath substrate, they are going to be in xml. So how do we deal with. From a content side, we actually, you know, we farm, we harvest, we hunt. So that means we go keep looking for contents. People actually come and donate contents to us as well as we also, you know, commission authors, for example. You know, what we have done is that today in high schools, all the industry standard publishers, nobody focuses on new materials. But technology has been changing, the world has been changing. So till today, you know, even in United States, there is no standard beginning engineering book to teach in high schools. So we commissioned, you know, people to actually, we paid money for it to seed that content. We have brought out a classic, you know, 9th to 12th grade usable engineering book. What are the basics of engineering? Software engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, all of them together. And at the center of this is actually the quality of that entire book needs to be guaranteed. So we are designing a collaborative environment, a platform for people to come back and then actually log into our system, like this kind of a homepage, and then they can actually browse the system. Basically, here is a book on human biology. Here is a flex book on human biology that you can log in. And this whole book was assembled from Wikipedia. I will show you dynamically how you could do that. And then you can actually publish a book in the sense you can actually go into the system. Here is a screenshot where you can say, I want this book to be the pictures laid out on the right hand column. And you can have a layout wizard on the fly within this dynamic environment. And also you can preview that content and then such that it can be sent to the on demand printer and that particular book can be endorsed. So a state school system administrator can come back and say this particular set of collection of materials in a logically collected fashion, just like a playlist meets the demand for or the standards for California state government. So thereafter it can be endorsed and blocked. And also people can actually come back and then take an existing chapter and then go through this. So you can see a Google Web toolkit here, the fingerprint of that. So basically, they can pick their own chapter and then they can adapt and then edit it, and then they can keep a new version of that chapter for their own environment. So now, not only that you took an existing book, you can also adapt it to your custom needs. For example, if you want to teach in a sixth grader or a fifth grader about area and perimeter, the best way to teach about area and perimeter is about, you know, if you want to draw, you know, sidelines of a soccer field that is a perimeter, then you can teach it in a applied way. You can create your own set of problems. So we will also provide an environment for you to adapt the system and then publish it back too. So this is the life cycle that you would see. Now, what are the architectural principles of this particular system? Okay, what happened in iTunes model is they took the album and then broken into individual songs. So now you have to decompose a book into elemental structures. Then the next thing is that we should allow open authoring as well as closed authoring. Closed authoring is that very sequential. You go and then edit your book in a Microsoft Word or a Google Doc and then you share it with others. But during that editing process, you are not sharing with, whereas in a wiki, you should be able to do it in a very open way and adaptive versioning. So, for example, typically the standard book publishers, what they do is like they write one main book and then they give it to state of New York, they give it to state of California, and then adapt the same book for different versions. And that is how this is almost like your source code, subversion, branching. You know, when there is a main release and then you make a, you know, main trunk, you can actually branch and then version it and then diff and merge it. So this particular system should, you know, also support that kind of a feature set. Then contextual collation. For example, if you, if you want to actually create a custom book on laser physics and spectrometry, you also want to make sure the prerequisites for that, the basic Rules of optics, the basic rules of reflection, the basic rules of refraction and is also collated within the same book. So that is also called, we call it as contextual collation. Then eventually flexible manifestation. You know, I mean we know that paper print is not going away and we all know that tangibly that we still look into paper at the same time. You know, some of us want to read it on our mobile devices, some of us want to actually get a USB image. So you pop it into your parents machine and that machine becomes your book right now. And and then you remove your USB stick and that's not, you know, it becomes your parents computer. So you should be able to manifest these materials in many other formats. So let's look at the elemental structures. How do we decompose a book? So basically first of all the basic element of the system is URL or the URIs. So it's like could be image, it could be a media object, it could be an audio object. And it has certain semantics associated with it. The next thing is we call it as an element which is a collection of. Actually I will show you a detailed example of element. So here is a, you know, whatever that is enclosed in boxes. We call them as elements. So a book can have a flowing text and then boxes embedded in it. And these boxes we call it as logical elements. You know, think of your div structure in HTML construct. So it can be a combination of text and images and then other media, binary objects. The next thing is a chapter. As you know, any book in any chapter is a collection of how we define this as a chapter has a title and then a conceptual definition and then overview of that particular topic and then bunch of elements embedded in it. And then a question and review and those check your understanding section, that kind of stuff that is a chapter as in any other book. And then eventually a flex book which is a collection of a chapter. So this is nothing but your table of content. So this is how we basically break down a book into four major entities. And the next piece is the open authoring. So how someone can actually use a email editor, a word processor, a wiki interface in order to collaborate with our system. And how this system can support branch versioning as well as main trunk versioning. And also how this can manifest into HTML or RSS feeds. See for example, someone can should be able to get their book as an RSS feed, why not? Right? So going back to the same thing on the manifestation, this is how we transcribe or we translate or we, you know, Evolve our contents from one form of another. This you will actually see in action. I will show it to you. You know, right now we can support HTML as well as PDF, but in future we will also support a USB image thing. So the entire book will be in a USB image. As well as RSS feeds, we call it as Flex feeds. So right now, as I said, we also harvest contents. I mean Google crawls, but we harvest. So in the sense we go into Wikipedia or any open educational resource site which actually is compatible with our license. So our license is Creative Commons share alike and by attribution. So whoever complies with that license, we can actually go into that particular website and bring the content online and then in line into your own book. I'll show it in. Actually, let me actually show the demo. Ok, here is our homepage. So here is our home page. Right now we are going to go into a limited beta on January 28th. So anyone who wants to participate let us know. And this is our application home page. It completely runs on Amazon's elastic computing cloud EC2 infrastructure. And I'll show you before, rather than keep talking, you can actually go and then create your own book. Or you can actually see one standard book. For example, we told about the ASU engineering book that we commissioned to write. It's here. So let me show you this particular book. While that's popping up, let me actually go into Google and here I'm going to search for. People's physics book. So here is the book that a couple of authors, their names are James Dan and they have written this whole book for 9th through 12th grade physics. And they have put it already outside and it is a donated content to our environment. But they have written this book. Many kinds of these books already exist in the environment today. So this is the book. Each one of them are actually in a monolithic PDF chapter environment. Whereas what we have taken is that that particular book now is actually broken down into kind of an itunes. And then you see this is like your itunes interface for Flexbooks. So that is what you have. Now in this environment, I am actually going to create a new book in front of you. So assume that we are going to create a book on light, magnetism and electricity. So you can actually be able to search for light. And then you see the chapters and you should be able to preview that particular chapter and assume that this is the chapter you want to. You simply drag and drop that particular chapter into your book. Same thing. Now I want to have magnetism. So here is a chapter on magnetism. And then I want to have a chapter on electricity. So I got on three chapters at the same time. Assume that this particular student is a fast learning student and assume that we want to give them additional topics, advanced topics like reflection, total internal reflection, dispersion, just on the optics light chapter. But this particular book for 9th grade, it is not going to have it. So how can I get and then incentivize that particular student to get that additional materials? So what we will do is search for in a reflection. But only thing is we are not going to just search in CK12 now we are going to dynamically search in Wikipedia. I turn that particular flag on and now I go into Wikipedia. Now I see the reflection. So let me actually click on it. You can see the preview of that as is in Wikipedia. And now dynamically I can get that chapter on online into my book. Now next thing is I want total internal reflection. So now I want that particular book. Now same thing, dispersion. Now I have collated my book, but only thing is that I want to also I can resequence this chapter like this drag and drop. So now I can create my own sequence. So far I have not even logged into the system. And as you know, any user is not going to give their credentials until you prove your worth. So you are not even required to register into the system. You are not even required to log into the system. Right now I can completely generate this book online and I'm going to do that right now. So all I click is this PDF button. Now it's going to actually generate that book in PDF. While that's generating, I can show you other books that we have already done that. Here are some PDF books that let it download while this is coming back. So I do a page down on this. So the whole chapters, everything is there. So these are custom made books. The whole book is available online. Likewise, if you actually when the other PDF generation comes back, you should be able to see it not only took the contents from the CK12 repository, it also dynamically went and harvested the contents, the open educational contents from Wikipedia. And it will collate all of them together. It will create pagination in sequence and such that the appendices, the indices and then glossary, they can all be collated together. So here it is. We did not save that name of the things. That is why it is just called Untitled Flex Book. But you can always give a name to it, add meta tags to it, and then you can share it with your friends. So let me Actually go back, and then we do a page down on this. If you really look at this, here are the paginations. The light is from CK12. The dispersion is from Wikipedia, and they were all collated together. So let us go into the light chapter. So let me actually put it in a page preview mode such that you can get the whole thing. So here is the dispersion from Wikipedia, and then here's the magnetism from CK12, and then reflection from Wikipedia. So you got the point, right? So now I can create. I mean, if you want a book on thermodynamics, I can go create on the fly. You know, refrigeration, heat engines, same thing. A book on biology, you can do it. So if an 11th grader comes in, you do not have to go to Barnes and Nobles again. You can always say that Wikipedia content is still not vetted out, but it's good enough. But this is an enabler, and when people get involved, you are going to get more and more content. Let me actually jump back to the presentation. So this is what, you saw it in action, and how can you take part in it? You know, we need help. We are. It is very tough hiring people. And then in all these things, we managed with, you know, almost like three engineers over the period of last five to six months. You know, we need help. And, you know, anybody who, you can refer, anybody who wants to come on sabbatical, anybody who wants to, you know, talk to us, there are lots of good stuff. Even, you know, this is open source. You know, it's one brick at a time. Right? You do one single tab. You know, even if you do come and, you know, create your own book, that's perfectly all right. Right. Actually, if I log in, you can create your own My Library type of books and then save it. So we will take questions. I'll also request Vinod to come in to take questions. Okay, go ahead.

So I've taught in schools, and I. And I'm a parent and, you know, this is really interesting, I think, particularly teachers who have students with learning disabilities.

Or anything like that.

I can see them using this to customize curriculum. What are the teachers reactions around testing and, you know, typically advanced students, that's an early indication that maybe we should push them ahead, let them skip a grade, grade, whatever. Now we're giving them the flexibility to actually customize curriculums to students of varying levels of capability within the class. So how, A, it sounds like a lot of work for the teachers, and B, how do they get around the Testing aspect and kind of the standardized metrics.

So I think this is where open source knowledge comes in. You know, most teachers do lesson plans well, those can be contributed to the library. So there is lots of supplementary material which will have to be developed for each of these textbooks. And I suspect teachers will be doing that. But it becomes easier and easier for any one teacher because other teachers are doing it and contributing it. So Neeru may be able to comment on it, but clearly supplementary material for classrooms will have to be developed. Once you have the textbooks and they're free and much more accessible, you'll start to see that show up. It's the same question that was asked about Wikipedia or Linux. Linux was a little kernel, it was useful, and it's amazing what it has grown up to be. So the model is the same.

One of the things that we made very clear from the beginning was that we were not going to tell teachers how to teach or what to do. We were actually going to take one part of the problem in education and try and solve that. And I think, you know, paying $600 million in California, when we're struggling with balancing, you know, budget and we start cutting education again, you know, this kind of system can help take away one that problem number two, it actually can help the teacher help in a classroom of 18 to 20 or whatever number of students there will be now, you know, help those students. A teacher can, you know, help them keep their pace. Right. So if you can help a student who's not doing well on standardized tests, we are not going to help them do standardized tests yet. That may come in the future, but at this point we're not going to help them. So if they want to do something towards standardized test, they can start with taking differentiated instruction, differentiated content, so each child can learn at the rate that they can learn at, and that we can help with very easily by having them customize the content for each kid.

It's almost like a Montessori model.

No, I think the important thing to remember is this is not trying to solve the education problem. That's just too big and too large a problem with many dimensions. It's trying to take one piece of it. People use textbooks. Here's a better way to do textbooks. It's not trying to say we teach it wrong or we have the wrong standards. One should define the problem narrowly and say it's tackling this problem, not every other problem.

Yeah, I mean, see, primarily you look at economical benefit and then there is also some sort of emotional benefit. I'll talk about that as well as evolutionary too economical is that obviously your price point comes down. For example, the Jamestown book is actually already adopted in six high schools in California. Only thing is that they do not have ability to manifest it. They do not see it right now. They have to go to Kinkos or keep it as a paper print. Whereas this gives you a hard bound, color printed, polished paper print book at a very low cost at a print cost. So that is an economical difference. Here are the books. Actually, you should be able to see it. The second thing is that it looks.

Just like a textbook.

It. It's still not hard bound, by the way. We could actually do the hard bound. Here are other books actually feel it. Actually you can. The other thing is that the emotional benefit. Here is the emotional benefit. You said you are a parent, how much your kid is carrying? What grade is your.

She's a preschooler. But I think this would be really interesting. As a parent, I would love to create workbooks for my child. But particularly in California and in the Bay Area, everything is so competitive. So you're always interested in getting your children to the top of the class and getting them into the best schools and getting them into the right universities.

Right.

So as a parent, I'd be saying, well, is my child having the most advanced flexbook? Is my child, you know, is she getting the benefit?

Is she.

Where is she in the scale?

Actually, let us talk about even a pre endorsed standard book, you do not have to carry it as a big luggage. Right now I buy books for my sixth grader son, an additional set of books such that he does not have to lug books around. And they are like $80, $90. So that is an emotional benefit. And then finally, as Vinod mentioned, it's evolutionary in the sense, you know, this is the beginning point. Right. See, if you really take a text book, there are multiple things, you know, standards, curriculum, and then actual materials, then lesson plan, then actually the teaching materials, then you know, pacing the teachers to teach it within that particular, you know, fiscal year. Then, you know, assessment, then, you know, figuring out how do you figure out, you know, whichever the weakness it is, how do I actually, you know, reinforce all those things comes into. But this is a beginning point in the sense if you want freedom, if you are the last mail delivery teacher. So going back to teachers, we have run focus group studies. Teachers say we do not have time, obviously they do not want to go do the research. But there are 40 teachers in an elementary school. Even if one teacher assembles one thing that's much more shareable across. They are very much happy about that. Yes, go ahead.

Who are the early adopters of this?

So right now we are focusing on California Pilot and we are talking to charter schools and private schools as well as public schools in specific targeted demographies. There are schools that has pain points actually after leaving from here we are going to go to, you know, public or a private school.

It's a private school.

Private school here in Menlo Park. So we are very much, you know, we are down to earth. We are running this like a start up company. You know, there is a very narrowed scope pilot because you know, sky is the limit for it. You know, if you really look at the international effect of it, you know, Africa, India, emerging economies, they have a huge benefit out of that. But we are very much heads down focusing on California Pilot.

The problem with your message, and this is just a general feedback on what I'm feeling right now, is that most of the school teachers, they just want.

A book and they want to teach.

They are not authors. They don't consider themselves authors. They don't consider themselves subject matter experts to even assemble something that they can say, this is the best compilation I can think of. So they would want somebody like this names that you mentioned that authored the physics book. They want to pick names from a list and say I want to pick this. So you're going to have to invite major authors to author on your system so that people can just get things.

To be fair, there's how many books being done today?

There are 17 books.

17 books in process already.

17 new original books.

Okay, 17 new original books. I suspect a school district might decide to save money. Here's a textbook recompile for our school district. But what the teacher will do is say I don't like the way this diagram is drawn. I'll draw it a little differently. And one out of 40 teachers will improve the diagram and then submit it. And now it's permanently part of repository that everybody can use. So there's a better way. I don't like this paragraph. I'll rewrite this paragraph and submit it. And you know, only a few percent of the teachers need to do that for the books to get better and better and have the best explanations are two different ways of explaining the same thing. And that's where open source really matters.

So these are pre endorsed standard books as it is. You do not have to touch anything. For example, this particular book is the engineering book for high school is ready to print. It's already there. So There are pre cut books also available. It doesn't mean that you had to always create something custom. And we Predict Almost like 95% of the people will use the pre cut books. You are absolutely right.

Because the other terminologies you are using are more engineering oriented terminologies like versioning or branching. And being a CM person, I can see, you know, hey, these guys have burgeoning and branching. But I don't think if I go to my daughter's teacher, she'll say what are you talking about? People don't go to a bookstore and say hey, give me the Saratoga High branch of physics book. You know, they don't talk like that. So you might have to do a.

Little bit of different.

No, but a teacher will say, here's the six chapters I want to teach. I don't need to put all 42 chapters. They will do that and then say, hey, Instead of spending $80, we can get it for $8. Let me just print these four chapters. That's all you expect from 95% of the people. And some may not even do that. The school district may say, here's what we'll do. And a few will get more involved and enhance the content over time.

See the second half we went into technical details mainly because it's a tech talk. But for preachers everything is transparent. They do not deal with the second half of the thing at all. They come here, drag and drop, print their book, done search, assemble, print. That's all they need to know.

So there's no cost to teachers, there's no cost to users of this or is that just for the initial prototype?

No, there will be no cost other than whatever the cost of printing is you if, if you want to print.

But if you want to print it at home, no cost because it's all PDF.

How do the authors get compensated or how do people providing content.

So okay, let's talk about the James Dan book or the other book that you would see. They're all. Even before we existed, these people have written their books and then they already put it for open source. There are plenty of materials that are available. That's one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it in order to showcase the engineering book is something that we have seeded. So we from CK12 apart from, as I said, the tenets of the CK12. Right now, half the investment or the foundation operations goes into technology. Half the operations goes into content creation and editing process. In fact, we have actually mimic the process of the quality vetting with 40 different reviewers and editors and authors working across the country in a very virtually networked way to vet out these books. So we pay for that. So 50% of our operations cost goes into content creation right now. But in a longer term, during the equilibrium condition, we believe that somebody can only offer that particular step and that becomes like an open source thing. Right. Nowadays, who does QA power? Open source Linux is one step at a time.

So I think one way to look at this is you will have a base set of books that are available for free and the content is open source content, Creative Commons share alike, that they will in fact probably be reviewed more than a book from Apprentice hall will be reviewed by experts, multiple experts who want to help this process. So there will be probably a higher level of review than Apprentice hall and 9th grade math textbook might have. And that's just the starting point. And then a few of the teachers who use them will keep improving it. A better diagram, a better explanation, a better illustration. You know, if you're explaining the planetary system, a link that takes you to a real model of an Aurari so you can see it online. Far better than the little thing showing the Earth, the sun and the planets rotating around it statically. So that's where this thing will get substantially better.

Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about standards and standards management and how you can help teachers ensure that their textbooks.

They'Re assembling meet the state standards, the curriculum standards? Yeah, actually, you know, that is also very, very transparent. It's the underneath substrata. Oh, she's more qualified to answer that question. So what we are trying to also do underneath is that working with, you know, certain organizations in the country which works across, you know, all the 50 different states and then they have devised, you know, certain, you know, database. So we are planning to leverage that. So somebody comes and says, you know, our dream is like this and it is very much possible and very much doable. It is a matter of time, in another six months or something like that. So what we want is that somebody comes and says ca space seven, space math. That is it. So we should automatically either should have inlined the California math curriculum into our system, broken down into coordinates and map the contents according to that and then generate the book. That is one possibility. The other possibility is also in a wiki way, you guys know conference, you guys should also know unconference. Unconference is that you decide your own conference session on the fly. Likewise, some of the advanced teachers, when we did the focus group study, literally 15% of the teachers wants to be on the advanced path. Whether it's a public school, private school, charter school, does not matter. They have extra time. The 85% of the teachers, they are overwhelmed with their current duties. But these 15% of the teachers can help also hone down the standards base. Right. So. But assessment, we are not touching it and it's beyond our scope at this moment. But standards is part of the game. Yes.

Is there any way, if I were.

A third grade teacher to just short for third grade?

Yes, the whole social networking part of it. Right.

In fact there will be. It's like California third grade.

Yeah.

So think of it as a large repository of content than a number of filters that can be applied to make it relatively simple. I mean, there's no reason showing a California third grade teacher content that's approved in India, for example. So they get what's relevant for their filter.

And also it's contextual. Right. See, for example, let's talk about if a 9th grade teacher's profile versus 7th grade teacher's profile and assume that both of them are going to search for simultaneous equations, what would you bring in? For a seventh grade teacher you want to bring in simultaneous equation solutions through substitution. Whereas for a 9th grade teacher you want to bring in simultaneous equation solutions through matrices. So contextual information is also very important.

And it's worth commenting on the international aspects. Suddenly the quality of textbooks for Latin America gets much better because somebody has then translated this in that language. And we've seen that phenomena on Wikipedia endlessly because nobody wants to do content for areas where there aren't large markets. In fact, one thing connections discovered is the signal processing textbook is actually now available in Spanish when no signal processing textbook was available for a Brazilian engineering school before. And that's the other power. When you start to look at its worldwide reach and imagine sort of teaching Elementary K through 12 in Africa, there aren't enough textbooks customized and still keep the high quality of content.

See, not only that, you can also say here is the left hand pages are in English medium. The right hand page can be in your bilingual, your mother tongue. So assume that you are talking about dispersion or a refraction or reflection. You can actually talk about rainbow in Spanish language while the dispersion is being so page by page. You can have very good examples.

I think definitely one of the other.

Advantages is the environmental impact. Because I remember when I was at college, you know, we had to.

You end up using maybe 50% of.

If that, if that.

Right.

And then so.

You Mentioned the need for resources and engineering. What are some of the other areas? It seems like there might be a long tail out there.

Just content development, long tail of content, long tale of reviewers, people who, who are qualified to participate at different levels. Niru, you want to talk?

That's pretty correct actually. We need workers basically at every level. Technology workers, volunteers, it's the same thing. So, you know, already we have about 15 people working, but then we have another 50 people who have, you know, joined us remotely from the different parts of the world. And we have, you know, volunteers too. One couple of people from Canada, we have two developers in Scotland. So, you know, I think we should be able to get some help from people around us here. That would be absolutely fabulous if we can get people. If you're on sabbatical and you want to take some time off and come do something different, we would love for you to, to come and join us. I mean, I think if you can do that kind of volunteer work, if you know teachers. One of the things that hasn't been mentioned here about teachers is people talk about the textbook issue that, you know, they want textbooks. But on the other hand, there are a large majority of teachers that find textbooks absolutely useless. What they do is the state tells them, buy these textbooks, they get them, put them in the cupboard, lock the cupboard and teach from their own material. That's happening in a lot of the classrooms. It's the teachers that are new one to three year old teachers that actually need help and need textbooks. A lot of teachers who are with struggling districts need textbooks. They need lesson plans, they need very concrete material and lesson plans on what to teach and how to teach. But the seasoned teacher says, I don't need help, I know what I want to teach, I know what works with students. So those kind of teachers are really what we are wanting to tap into. And there are quite a few in the focus groups that we did. I would say about 20% of the teachers that came for those focus groups said we want to help. We have our own material. When can we put it across? One teacher was so antsy. We are focused on STEM courses right now. We're not going into. STEM is science, math, engineering and technology for K through 12. Other disciplines we're not going into yet because, you know, history, what history are we going to teach? You know, do we teach local history or do we teach extended history? So we've kind of stayed away from those other domains yet. But if you know, teachers who might be able to contribute and help us encourage. So if Google has a teacher. Like Yahoo has a teacher network. So maybe. I don't know if Google has a teacher's network. Do you know anything? Maybe even one day you were a teacher. Maybe you can help. So that's. Thank you. I think this is great. Thank you so much, everyone, for coming.

Thank you.