CK12 Got Slashdotted today!

Posted on | August 13, 2009 | No Comments

This morning a friend of mine, Ken Lim, congratulated us for being slashdotted. Of course this was in context of some of CK12′s books recommended by the state of CA for classroom usage. Earlier this summer, Govt. Schwartzenegger called for the submission of free open text books in digital format to be used in California high schools in 2009. The submissions were to be judged based on CA standards to make sure that they are suitable for classroom usage.

As any other Slashdot posts, this one was a fertile topic for heated banter between proponents and opponents of free and open textbooks. One of these exchange threads talked about Richard Feynmann’s experience when he was asked to serve on State of California’s Curriculum Commission to choose Mathematics books in 1964. Per his own published words, the methodology was ‘idiotic’.

I hope that in this day and age, this is no longer the case. At the very least we know that these submissions were scrutinized, and the result is openly published in here. And the highlight is that out of the 16 digital textbooks submitted, 10 of those digital textbooks met at least 90 percent of the California State Board of Education’s adoption standards and 6 of those 10 were CK-12 FlexBooks. In addition, only 4 met 100 percent of the standards and 3 of them were from the CK-12 Foundation: CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry and CK-12 Chemistry. Now go shop for quality text books, for free, here.