CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in January 2007. Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

Key Benefits

Initially, CK-12 has commissioned a baseline archive of open educational resources (textbooks) through a combination of author donations, licensing partnerships, incentives for community-based authorship, and university collaborations. Flowing from this baseline, CK-12 will actively moderate the expansion of its content base from an active, contributing community while creating a framework for aligning its assets with an expanding base of learning standards like McREL Compendium. CK-12 intends to make use of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, which grants freedom to anyone to use and reuse its core materials. For print versions, the organization envisions working with a marketplace of on-demand presses to provide customized, but traditional looking, paper textbooks at low cost. This cost will be born by the user at their discretion directly at the on-demand press.

CK-12 is presently comprised of a group of visionary advisors and highly accomplished Silicon Valley engineers. In addition to possessing deep skills in emerging web technologies, CK-12's technical organization is uniquely capable of delivering a high performance, scalable infrastructure that will be accessible to all students, teachers, and parents anywhere in the world. In addition to the technical team, CK-12 has seeded content through experienced and practitioner developers of K-12 content. While the initial set comprises sixteen traditional but modularized textbooks, the set is expected to grow rapidly.

Next Generation Textbooks
CK-12 allows one to customize and produce content by re-purposing to suit what needs to be taught, using different modules that may suit a learner's learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards.
Flexibility + Textbook =

The Need
Today, textbooks in use in the K-12 system are limiting, expensive, and difficult to update. Because of this, K-12 teachers find it hard to cater to different needs as well as to introduce new concepts.
We need a more flexible and less expensive system to create and distribute books and online content. The K-12 system needs to be provided with access to high quality online content, and simple solutions to create, customize, update, and print. This new concept provides a system that will follow an open educational resource philosophy to place content online that can be "mixed, modified, and printed" to suit a teacher's need while adhering to curriculum standards. Our solutions will enable all students to access and obtain an education around the globe.

Challenges

• Changing the mindsets of educators who claim not having the time to contribute, CK-12 needs active community involvement
• Keeping content contextualized to local, regional requirements as well as curriculum standards globally