One venue for the advancement of Open Educational Resources (OER) is through policy change at the local, state, federal, and international levels. In addition to an Education landing page and OER portal that explains Creative Commons’ role as the legal and technical infrastructure behind OER, CC has been conducting a series of interviews on open education and policy to help clarify some of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today’s education landscape.

In this installment, we spoke with Linda Wallinger, Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, and Lan Neugent, Assistant Superintendent for Technology, Career & Adult Education–both from the Virginia Department of Education. The Department has been exploring open education initiatives, including their work on the open textbook The 21st Century Physics Flexbook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies. In general, Virginia has been supportive of openness, and passed legislation that indicates a preference for state-funded materials to be released with a CC (or equivalent open) license. Linda and Lan shared benefits and drawbacks to the Flexbook, challenges to teachers utilizing OER, and the potential for OER to dovetail with new student assessment tools.

Q: Virginia is well known for developing the Physics Flexbook, in collaboration with publisher CK-12. The FlexBook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license (CC–BY–SA) and thus can be used as is, used in part, or enhanced by teachers based on their curriculum and classroom needs. What is the status of the Flexbook project and to what extent is the Flexbook used in class instruction? What are the reactions from teachers and students?

Lan: Because Physics is not a verified credit course in Virginia, we had a little more latitude with that particular subject. We’ve been hearing a lot from the business community and some educators about how long it takes to go through the review cycle. It’s a 7-year process. Obviously, a lot of content can change within that time period. Science changes all the time and there are topics that teachers would want to add to their teaching plans. For example, nanotechnology is not something we were concerned about seven or eight years ago. Now, it turns up in all sorts of areas like cosmetics and clothing and might be something teachers want to put into their curriculum. As we speak, there are additional Physics content areas being added to the Flexbook. The Physics Flexbook ended up being an ancillary document. Scientists, high school teachers, and college professors were recruited and each selected an area of expertise to write on. The Flexbooks are in use right now, but we don’t collect data on how much they are being used. My expectation is that teachers who want to go beyond the curriculum and have the time to do that are likely using the Flexbook as a resource repository for their teaching.

Developing the Flexbook helped us to see some of the benefits to and limitations of this model. One of the limitations of the Flexbook structure is that you could clearly tell who authored the content by the style of writing–a scientist writes differently than a businessperson, who writes differently than a teacher. How to address quality control standards have been somewhat problematic with the Flexbook. In traditional printed textbooks, you don’t notice these different voices because it’s edited as a whole to maintain a consistent tone. Another limitation is, of course, copyright issues. Most of the graphics and photos used came from the Library of Congress because they are free. It’s not to discredit these materials; we just thought it was interesting. One of the reasons why we are a state partner with some of the major publishers is that they have solved some of the copyright issues in their development and publishing process.

Linda: The Flexbook was a good way to get some experience in an OER endeavor, but from an expectation of instructional materials I would have hoped that it would have been more interactive. In many ways it was like a paper book that was displayed on the Internet. While that certainly makes it more accessible to individuals and opens the content, I’m still not sure it’s where I hoped it would be to engage teachers with best practices for teaching. By providing textbook resources through technological methods, it might prevent schools from having to buy textbooks. But, students often don’t have access to computers and the Internet at home, or at least it’s not guaranteed that they have it. So, schools have to turn around and print out the resources anyway. It’s not actually as much of a cost savings as it’s made out to be.

Lan: After we were working on the Physics Flexbook for awhile and started to realize some of its limitations, we thought it would be good to conduct pilots with companies that publish textbooks. We put out a call for groups to come in to talk to us, and 40 people came, representing all the major textbook publishers, and some smaller ones too. The publishers have seen what’s been happening with all the changes and consolidation within the music and newspaper industries. We said to them, “you spend a lot of money in binding and printing and physical production…how’d you like to talk about the core stuff you do?” They seemed amenable to discussing this. We’ve met with companies that are demonstrating incredible uses of technology. Some are creating a whole new digital experience. We’ve talked to them about teaching and learning through apps too. We’re very excited about new technologies like the iPad–not that we’re not excited about other technologies–but we thought the iPad would provide a good way to test the technology. Technologies like the iPad overcome the limitation in interactivity that we mentioned before, because it allows users to interact with content beyond traditional text. A year from now other computer companies will have similar products.

Q: Many of us in the OER world talk about the need for teachers to be able to take educational content and manipulate it, repurpose it, remix it, share it. How do teachers want to use content?

Lan: Traditional textbooks have served us well, especially for me as a beginning teacher, because the textbook was the curriculum. The concept of looking at different ways to deliver textbooks could be as simple as putting it online or making it able to be viewed on an iPad or similar device. It could be more complex by including lots of multimedia and other interactive resources. But fundamentally, even experienced teachers are looking to textbooks for guidance on what to teach, what the content should be, and what the process should be. In developing electronic textbooks, you have to hold onto those concepts. The textbook is a teacher’s guideline and roadmap. Any of the multimedia and enhanced materials that you can include to enliven instruction would attest to that.

Linda: Teachers don’t work in isolation when they’re teaching. They are bound to a curriculum that’s been designed by their school division in Virginia and the curriculum is aligned to the standards of learning set by the state. Teachers want the flexibility to mix and match lessons, but they first need a structure whereby they have an idea of the order in which materials should be presented. This is important because many school divisions have a pacing guide that determines at what point in the year teachers should be on a particular chapter of a book or specific topic within a lesson. While creative flexibility is important, it’s important to have structure too. Most teachers don’t teach just one lesson plan. Elementary teachers teach all the content areas. Teachers don’t have the time to develop materials to support their curriculum and their lessons. Over a period of years teaching I’ve developed a sort of library of materials. I’m envisioning that this could be one way a teacher might use the internet-based materials or resources available under Creative Commons licenses.

Lan: Virginia is well positioned to do OER. We deliver just under 2 million online tests per year. Our general assembly and governor’s office have been very helpful in proving the connectivity and devices in order to do online testing. Fairfax School District in Virginia is working on a project called eCart, which is a bucket of OER and other electronic resources that are accessible and shareable by teachers. The Fairfax system ties together the resources and data on student achievement. The system helps teachers analyze whether their students are learning what they should.

Linda: One of the pieces required for states’ Race To the Top applications was addressing an instructional improvement system that was technology-based. It sparked a lot of conversation. I envision a dashboard that allows access to electronic tools used by the school division, like a grade book, but also something like an electronic filing cabinet where teachers can import other electronic resources. We also realized that there should be a common format for all of these electronic resources, along the lines of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) so that all of these resources can truly be shared by many, as opposed to materials being developed just for the iPad, etc.

Q: The Common Core Standards are a shared set of core state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. How can the Common Core standards intersect with OER?

Linda: Certainly when you have Common Core standards in place across multiple states, any kind of technology that helps communications among these states is going to be invaluable. Most states have expended tremendous resources in developing content standards either before or as a result of No Child Left Behind. Virginia has spent a lot of money in providing resources and materials to support teachers and students, not to mention the assessments that are aligned with these standards. The sheer act of creating common standards is not anywhere near the end of the journey. Having looked at the Common Core, they’re not really written at a classroom level yet. Instead, they are broad statements describing what a student should know. In many cases, states may have to recreate educational resources they already have because the new standards are in a different order or are somewhat different than the standards their boards have adopted. As this work proceeds in reading and math across 13 grades, it’d be wonderful to have the opportunity for teachers to collaborate on developing these resources, or to have one state work on one grade and another state to work on a different grade. That way, there doesn’t have to be duplicative effort.

Q: One piece of legislation in Virginia in support of OER creates an Open Education Curriculum Board. How can it help with the adoption and exploration of OER in Virginia education?

Lan: Virginia had HB 724, which would establish an Open Educational Curriculum Board. The law was sent back to committee, but was not acted upon. We certainly expect it to move in 2011. The board will include governor appointees and general assembly appointees. They will be charged with taking a look at OER that will hopefully be utilized by Virginia schools. The board will be establishing criteria to do their review. We’ll serve as staff to the board.

Q: How do you see the role of Creative Commons within the OER environment? How can CC help in terms of educating policymakers and Virginia teachers?

Lan: We need to look at a state like Virginia, look at all their existing policies and procedures, look at the types of things impacted by OER, and make recommendations as to how states might reconcile those policies that don’t fit well in the new learning environment. We need to disseminate best practices around using technology, as well as the SREB guidelines. Right now, there’s a bit of chaos in the OER arena around copyright issues. Teachers know they can make a single copy of things to use. We need more guidance on these legal issues. With respect to the eCart program I mentioned earlier, OER needs to be tied to student learning outcomes. It’s too easy to take OER and shotgun them all over the place and be done with it.

Linda: When you convene groups working on OER, you need to include end users. Many of the people currently talking about OER are not the people that need to implement them in a school-based setting. Visionaries are important, but sometimes they get their feelings hurt when the educators don’t embrace everything they suggest. It’d be valuable to have people at the table such as principals, classroom teachers, school board members, and maybe state department staff form the instruction and technology side.

Q: Wrapping up, what does a successful teaching and learning environment implementing the power of OER “look like”? Do you have any lingering thoughts—worries, hopes, and predictions?

Linda: Lan mentioned that one of the biggest hurdles around adopting and implementing OER is that the policies in place now were mostly created for brick and mortar schools. Sometimes educators give off signals that they are intimidated by or not supportive of OER. But really, I think one problem is that the teachers are not able to visualize how OER can be introduced into existing teaching structures. This is complicated by the fact that board and state policies are not easy to change on a dime. Talking about OER, we get questions about things like assessment. The assessment process is high stakes–it determines whether a student graduates or whether a school is accredited. Clearly, there needs to be some policy changes or changes in the assessment process. Other questions revolve around the amount of time students should spend in school, as well as addressing appropriateness of some educational content and parent complaints.

Lan: One of the things interesting in K-12 is that when the classroom door shuts, all the policies, procedures and best practices really boil down to simply how the teacher teaches. If you take away the primary element of how teaching has been conducted–through direct instruction–many teachers are lost. I’m interested in looking at different methods of teaching. In college, you’re taught 20-30 different methods of teaching, but most aren’t used. In the virtual teaching environment, we’re prompted to look at those other methods beyond lecturing. We can energize students with technology, and there’s a lot of gold to be panned in exploring many new teaching methods. OER would allow many opportunities and latitude to have really good and engaging instruction. The sharing of resources and best practices would help teachers do other things to enhance the learning of not only mainstream kids, but gifted students too. Struggling students can use these resources to review content in other formats or at different paces. We’ve distributed iPod touches within our agency, because when people have the technology in their hands, they begin to see the new possibilities. In the teaching profession, teachers are enthusiastic their first year, they really learn how to teach in the second, third, fourth and fifth years, and by the sixth year they ask, “why am I teaching this in the same way forever?” Technology and open source can energize teachers and keep teaching fresh. We need to work through the nitty gritty of the policies, like copyright and restructuring books.

Linda: One of the big challenges will be to introduce the concept of OER as a methodology into our teacher preparation programs. Most teachers get their ideas of how to teach either from how they themselves were instructed or from the lessons learned in their teacher preparation programs. If they’re not made aware of the opportunities within OER, they’ll be slow to introduce them. I think the good news is that most teachers coming into these programs today are already familiar with many of these tools. Classrooms won’t immediately rely solely on OER, but will adopt a hybrid model. There will still be publishers and vendors that provide content in a structured manner that teachers can follow and school divisions can have confidence in. It’d be great if these vendors or publishers could then link into their own materials ways to import changing OER and apps.

When questioned about the future of copyright reform (wait for the video to load and scroll to the 7:30 mark) Chopra mentions how he “embraced the Creative Commons licensing regime” when he worked with the Commonwealth of Virginia to publish their Flexbook platform. Chopra then states that he thinks that it was this experience that really informs his perspective on how intellectual property should be remixed, shared, and reused.

Needless to say, we totally agree.

CC BY-SA by the CK12 Foundation

Below, we get to the bottom of the origins of CK-12, Neeru’s own personal tie to the cause, and some insights into what may lie ahead for both the foundation and ccLearn.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? You are widely known as the founder of CK-12; what is your official role and how did you come to found this nonprofit?

First of all, I just want to set the record straight, I am one of the co-founders along with Murugan Pal, who is the other co-founder of CK-12.  I serve as the Executive Director and Murugan as the President.

I am the mother of four children; I have a master’s degree in molecular biology and a degree in education.   After my degree I worked for a year and a half at Stanford at the Children’s Hospital working on Insulin-like Growth Factors that were being implicated in cancer.  It was at that point that I got pregnant with my first child and decided not to be around radioactive elements.   As I continued raising my children I asked myself the question – other than a safe and loving home, what can I give my children that will be of value to them and society for the rest of their lives? Perhaps all the sacrifices that my parents made so that their kids could have a good education had definitely proved that point.

When I found the school, The Nueva School, I knew that they were on the right track – focusing on learning, critical thinking, emotional intelligence as well as learning to learn in this day of information.  I soon became involved with the organization through my involvement with their board and becoming the Head of the Education Committee.  When my children started going to high school and college I knew I had to find something for myself to do and decided to go back to school and did another masters at Stanford in Education.  It was here that I realized that most children did not have the same experience as I thought they should have.  This is the United States of America!  I knew that I had to bring access to information at the same level for all students in K-12 in the USA.  The idea came out when my husband asked me to look at the “Textbook issues”.

What about open education appeals to you? Can you say a few words about what you think truly open education is, or should be?

I see open education as education that is supported by open educational resources.  These resources make it possible to have content that is not just the voice of an individual but is the result of the community involvement, i.e. wisdom of many.  In fact, open resources are not driven by any artificial or self-serving motives such as profits, sales, marketing, etc.   Fundamentally, education cannot be “open” in the same sense as open software.  In fact, if you look at history we used to pass our collective knowledge as stories.  With the advancement of technologies, paper, print media, digital media and personal computing, that passage of stories has taken on other formats – primarily textbooks for education.   Unfortunately, these books have become the ownership of a select few rather than the effort of many.  We have lost the dialogue that can enhance the quality. Additionally, K-12 education is more controlled and contextualized, particularly public education.  The following three tenets have to have the following characteristics:

1. Content
   a. Content is free to all to use
   b. Content is created by many people – voice of many over ownership of a few
2. Access is provided to all equally
   a. Providing the ability to access, hence multiple ways to providing education – text,
online, multimedia, and other media for all students
   b. Cost of access is covered for all students
3. Commitment to quality even though it is free

I believe that education should be free to all students, particularly in the USA.  How can we even try to educate students if they don’t have access to information?  Younger students particularly need material from which they can take off for learning.  They have to be provided scaffolding for learning – a Vygotskian Concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky).  There is a focus on the wrong notion that only higher education needs to be free and open hence more effort is being put into that area.  However, the problem becomes crucial to elementary students as lack of content availability erodes these young students’ ability to learn, as they are not able to have a strong base of knowledge to rely on.

Open education is one way that we can provide access – the “rip, mix, and burn” metaphor allows for the ability to customize content as needed by each student.  At this point schools are provided with information that is delivered in a very old format – a textbook.  Textbooks, especially their physical nature, are hard for students at that age – weight, monolithic nature, arising from 50 states having different requirements, hard to change the content of the book, etc.

CK-12′s mission is very clear on its site—”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.” How is CK-12 currently carrying out this mission?

We are carrying out this mission by providing textbooks, particularly for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) books.  These books have been produced the way that publishers produce their books.  There is no charge from CK-12 for using these books online through our online reader, downloading, or customizing them to your own needs.  As we like to say, “Rip, mix and burn”.  The cost of the printing is the only cost that users have to carry.  This cost will go to your own choice of printing company or for better you can print them using  your home printer.

CK-12 and the Commonwealth of Virginia just released the beta version of the first Physics FlexBook to be aligned with state standards. Can you say a few words about this project and how it came to fruition?

The Commonwealth of Virginia did a study with NASA. This two-year study pointed out that the curriculum as well as the textbook that the Commonwealth was using was outdated and did not have any of the contemporary topics in physics such as LCD, LED, Nanotechnology, Biomedical Imaging, String Theory etc.  Their textbooks stopped at Cathode ray tubes.  That technology was really outdated resulting in no time left for the schools to teach other concepts if they continued to teach these outdated concepts.  The report also pointed out that the Commonwealth should look into open educational resources.

When the Commonwealth talked to the publishers the answer was not satisfactory both from financial and time to market perspectives.  At the same time the CTO of the Governor found out about CK-12 from the web and approached us.  The rest is history!  Governor Tim Kaine sent out a RFP (Request for Proposal) and we had 13 people comprised of scientists, teachers, and professors – volunteering to write the book with CK-12 supporting them.  In addition, CK-12 redrew all the diagrams to make them higher resolution.  We also provide all our diagrams in a repository so that others can use these diagrams, keeping in line with the philosophy of open content. We wrote that book in 2½ months with another two weeks for quality assurance.

Do you see CK-12′s goals evolving as more and more institutions and persons use CK-12′s open textbook technologies (specifically the Flexbook)? For instance, could you see expanding the scope of your mission to encompass more than open textbooks?

At this point we do not see our mission moving from OER books.  The overall goals of the project have not changed.  We are constantly being asked whether we are going to be catering other domains.  Wherever I am going, people ask what about history, economics, or…..  I think, that at some point we will have to answer that question.  Perhaps that will be the only thing we will have to add to our goals.  We are also asked by higher ed people if they can use our tools.  The good thing about that is we don’t have to tell people what they can do or cannot do.  The power of the system is that it is useable under any condition.  All you have to do is use it.

We are finding that we have to focus on more feature sets.  As my cofounder Murugan said to me, that software is a bottomless pit.

What do you see as the future of the textbook? Does the current economy affect this vision at all?

If we are to move to Textbook 2.0 or even 3.0, we have to think about the textbook aligning with other capabilities that are provided by eLearning such as multimedia and other kinds of interactive abilities.  Textbooks have to move from a static format to an interactive format.  This is where our tools will really be useful.  I think this is going to be a very exciting development in general in education.

Sure the current economy will affect the vision mostly positively.  Districts are now going to have to think more creatively about how to provide good content to their students yet at the same time be able to operate with same budgets.  No matter how you look at it, $600 MM is a lot of money to spend for California alone, especially if you can avail better options and cut the spending down.  If we provide quality content we should be able to attract users.

Your Flexbooks are licensed BY-SA. What is the importance of open licensing in the textbook’s future? Why did CK-12 choose the BY-SA license, specifically?

Content has been a closed entity forever.  All the scientific and mathematical advancements were built upon improving an already existing work (standing upon the giant’s shoulders) thus leading to better achievements in an open fashion.  It is now time to provide educational materials under a different model.  A model where people can use it the way they want and need to use it.  We have seen that one-size-does-not-fit-all in education.  Once we move to that model we will see progress.  Even though we have protective clauses such as the Williams Act for providing textbooks for all students we still are not able to provide content that every student has access to.  Even though students have books you can see the difference in rich districts vs. poorer districts.  Charter Schools or Home schooled students have problems with accessing good content.  It costs too much.

When we started this project we went to India and told them about saving cost – their laughter was kind of piercing because their books only cost pennies compared to ours and the Government owns their national curriculum.  The textbook industry needs course correction.  One of the biggest problems is lack of rigorous universal standards for 50 states.  So, if we can provide FlexBooks such that states can adapt the content to their own requirements, that will help a lot with course correction.

The reason we chose to go with CC-BY-SA was because we wanted to make a statement about openness.  We believe that the Creative Commons spirit is about openness.  However, we are also thinking about donations from teachers and writers who have done a tremendous amount of work in producing or writing lesson plans or textbooks.  When we approached these teachers or writers their concern was, how would they protect their work if a publisher takes their work with only attribution?  They wanted to see the improvements made to their original contribution “back in the commons”.  This is when we realized that we had to respect this genuine perspective and make them feel comfortable.  Hence the choice of license!  One thing we have continued to advise and educate our Author Donors is to stay out of the Non-Commercial clause.  This is in the spirit that the non-commercial clause makes the content stale and obsolete over a period of time.

CK-12 and ccLearn have been in informal contact for some time. How do you see us working together in the future?

ccLearn can help organizations such as CK-12 to work together in a “federated” fashion.  It is high time we need mutual understanding and agreements for licensing policies, canonical representation format, and interchangeable metadata across OER organizations.  We have been partnering with ccLearn and Creative Commons in general in promoting these common agendas.

Is there a specific issue you would like us to tackle? Or another organization you would love to see us partnering with?

It will be good for ccLearn to host a summit for all OER sites to understand the importance of common standards to federate our contents across.  For example, my co-founder Murugan Pal has been working with Wikipedia, WikiEducator, OLPC etc. to forge these common standards.

Finally, what is in CK-12′s own future? What other partnerships or plans do you have in the pipeline? What are you most excited about?

We are very excited about the opportunity that the OER community has in this financially stressed out time.  To quote Paul Romer, “Crisis is a terrible thing to waste”; this is the time for us to bring OER into the main stream.  We typically don’t talk about our future plans; as we believe in getting it done, rather than talk about it.Our Virginia FlexBook project is the first stepping-stone, and we are working with various governmental agencies both in Federal and different State levels to make our mission successful.

The most notable Flexbook is the one we mentioned last fall—notable because of its integral tie to state standards via a partnership with the Commonwealth of Virginia. The textbook now has a title, 21st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies. According to Government Computer News, the effort was statewide, “a collaborative effort by the state departments of Technology and Education and volunteer educators, engineers and scientists using Web-based tools to quickly up-date educational resources” to “provide students with timely information about nanoscience, dark matter, quarks and leptons.” This only makes sense as Physics (and science in general) is a rapidly changing field that the traditional textbook review process cannot keep up with. Open textbooks, on the other hand, are instantly editable and constantly changing; you could even say that they are perpetually in beta.

Don’t hesitate to check it out, along with the myriad other Flexbooks up for review. All Flexbooks are licensed CC BY-SA.

What’s ahead of CK-12: the progression of existing Flexbooks and the partnerships they have with other states, where some are working on companion teacher editions.

Also, spring!

“It is that time of year where our nations school children are preparing their back packs ready to head back to start their new academic year. The contents of these bags has definitely evolved over years, considering now the average student’s back pack will contain more tech

nology than NASA had to take Apollo to the moon.

But one thing that has stayed constant is the good old fashioned text book. While it requires no batteries or boot up time, it still is the heaviest and most inflexible item in there.

Take for example, the current academic debate going on in the astromony world regarding the number of planets our solar system has. Is it 9, or is it 8?

“People in the know” decided that we actually have only 8 planets, based on the assumption that Pluto is too small to be a planet. Oh dear. Now we have all these text books that has the wrong information, and to make matters worse, depending on the State, it could take anywhere from 1 year to 6 to get it corrected. So not only are our children carry

ing around these heavy tombs, it turns out, the information inside of them is out of date!

The problem doesn’t end there, the same “people in the know” are being challenged by other “people in the know” and the Pluto debate is far from over.

But thats life. We live in an ever evolving world, where new discoveries are being made, old thinking rechallenged, as we increase our awareness and knowledge of the world and universe we inhabit. How is the humble back pack meant to cope?

The problem with our textbooks is that their granularity is simply too large. It only takes one paragraph to be wrong, for the whole book to have to be reprinted. So imagine when a whole discipline changes, in our Pluto example. They simply can’t take this level of change.

But here we are, asking our new students to carry around these tombs of outdated information in and out of school every day.

There has to be a better way no?”

It turns out there is a better way! The

The CK-12 Foundation‘s solution to the age-old problem of uneven shoulders. The Flexbook is a free and open source textbook platform where one can build and edit collaborative textbooks. This is the textbook of the next generation: “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 = Flexbook.”

All CK-12 content will be licensed CC BY-SA. We have been working with the CK-12 foundation for a while now and look forward to continuing collaboration. In related news, the Commonwealth of Virginia have also announced their partnership with the foundation to build an open physics flexbook for all of Virginia. Here is an excerpt from their press release:

“The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open–source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content. The Commonwealth is partnering with CK–12 (www.ck12.org) on this initiative as they will provide the free, open–source technology platform to facilitate the publication of the newly developed content as a “Flexbook” — defined simply as an adaptive, web–based set of instructional materials.”

The resulting Virginia Physics Flexbook will also be available under CC BY-SA.

(Logos are © CK-12 Foundation.)