The Case for Curriki Educational Experiences

Discover the transformative potential of high-quality, interactive digital learning with Curriki. As a non-profit educational technology organization, Curriki is passionately committed to developing and supporting innovative open-source technologies that personalize, engage, and enrich the learning journey for every student.

In the ever-evolving landscape of online education, numerous entities, ranging from for-profit and non-profit companies to academic institutions, standard bodies, governments, and entrepreneurs, have endeavored to create and deliver educational content. Regrettably, their efforts have led to a fragmented environment characterized by closed systems, limiting content accessibility to specific walled gardens. This presents challenges for content providers seeking to share their resources in a consumable manner and severely restricts individuals without access to these walled gardens from accessing high-quality online educational materials.

Curriki’s groundbreaking approach, known as the Curriki Education Experience (C2E) standard, aims to address these issues by incorporating proven best practices from the publishing industry, the education technology sector and drawing insights from successful standard development organizations. We also infuse the digital education space with elements of market economics and financial technology. Our vision is to create a future where educational content is paid for, portable, and protected, benefiting learners worldwide.

Key Premises of C2E

The process of creating amazing, engaging, interactive learning experiences lends itself to sustaining a vibrant, global entrepreneurial environment where education becomes “activated” and yields high-quality learning resources that are shareable, available, and scalable across multiple learning networks. The organizations and individuals who create these resources should be compensated, and their content should not be restricted by policy or technical constraints.

Curriki Educational Experiences (C2E) is a specification that has the potential of becoming the “lingua franca” of digital interactive content – the dominant currency and ecosystem that defines and enables the creation, licensing, sharing, and distribution of interactive digital content anywhere on any device, and on any digital learning system.

The C2E framework consists of empirically-based, service-oriented methods and tools based on open standards. This approach enables the syndication of learning resources – allowing content to live outside the system where it was originally created. This disintermediation breaks down the various silos that hold learning content hostage and increases learner agency significantly.

The answer to having a working education technology ecosystem seems naively simple: educational systems should work together, and they should empower learners to have the best opportunity to succeed. The current fragmentation in education technology, however, has created untenable barriers that prevent the seamless creation, distribution, and dissemination of digital educational content:

• Access to high-quality learning resources is currently inequitable and costly. 
• There are few incentives and marketplaces for authors to create quality, interactive digital content, differentiate it from mediocre content, and make it generally available for licensing.
• There is no mechanism to vet the quality and appropriateness of digital educational content.
• There is no way to protect the content from unauthorized access outside of requiring the content to be consumed inside a specific vendor’s delivery system.
• There is no way to deliver and protect the content on a device independent of the internet.

1st Premise: Portability

Digital educational resources should execute on any device, on any operating system, and on any learning or content management system, known or future. The construct of digital educational resources should be modular in nature, so they can be adapted to future devices and technologies:

• C2E’s play on any device or browser.
• C2Es support online and offline consumption.
• C2E technology supports the delivery of content to all the leading learning and content distribution platforms.

2nd Premise: Protection

Digital educational resources should be tamper-proof to maintain their academic integrity, as well as their economic value. Their structure should protect and help enforce any of its inherent copyrights and licensing agreements. The model should encourage the creation of digital educational content under the terms of open licenses such as the Creative Commons, but it should not exclude support for commercial and royalty-based licensing:

• C2Es enforce digital media licenses, rights, and security throughout the ecosystem, which reduces the risk of piracy.
• C2Es authenticate the content is unaltered. Easily tells the difference between derivative and original works.
• C2Es protect learner privacy, encourage student agency, and enable student-owned portfolios

3rd Premise: Vetted Quality

Digital education resources should be subject to processes that guarantee and verify their quality and accuracy. Automation, Artificial Intelligence, crowdsourced peer reviews, rating and review systems, and the application of quality control and quality assurance practices should be part and parcel of the digital education resource creation system.

4th Premise: Economic Viability

The digital education resource ecosystem supported by the C2E specification should provide economic incentives to the authors of premium media that augment the quality and enjoyability of educational experiences. The ecosystem should compensate media publishers, authors and creators, and curators for high-quality digital educational content. The authors/creators and curators of high-quality digital education resources are normally marginalized, and not compensated equitably for their value in raising human capital on a global scale:

• C2Es enable the accurate collection of payments and royalties from the sale and consumption of C2E Resources.
• C2Es generate an auditable record of the distribution and usage of C2Es for creators and media owners.
• C2Es reduce the cost of interactive content by removing barriers between media owners, creators, and learners.

The C2E Standards Strategy

In principle, the C2E specification should yield an architecture that leverages the OpenStand principles.

The principles…

“comprise a modern paradigm in which the economics of global markets—fueled by technological innovation—drive global deployment of standards, regardless of their formal status within traditional bodies of national representation. The OpenStand principles demand:

• cooperation among standards organizations;

• adherence to due process, broad consensus, transparency, balance, and openness in standards development;

• commitment to technical merit, interoperability, competition, innovation, and benefit to humanity;

• availability of standards to all, and

• voluntary adoption.”

The C2E Specification

C2E is an open-source project that publishes the C2E Document Specification, its APIs, and its MIT-licensed reference architecture and implementations. Together they support the creation and distribution of secure, portable, licensable, and quality-assured digital educational content

Maintained by the non-profit Curriki.org, C2E aims to create an open specification, publish an open API, and drive a vibrant ecosystem that delivers on the promise of high-quality digital educational experiences for all.

The C2E Standards Body

The C2E specification is managed through an open governance process, looked after by Curriki – a non-profit United States 501.c.3 corporation. Curriki acts as a neutral guardian of the C2E specifications, its core API, and the processes for certifying applications and plugins for conformity with the specifications and nurturing and growing C2E for the benefit of the whole ecosystem.

The keepers of the specification are the legal directors of Curriki, responsible for ensuring that it keeps on the mission and neutrally protects the development of C2E.

The C2E Ecosystem

Five Major Components of a Fully Integrated C2E Ecosystem

1) Intelligent, Collaborative Lesson Generation

Digital processes supported by the specification facilitate the collection, assembly, and preparation of digital instructional content, with intelligence that supports the identification of appropriate and effective materials.

2) Intelligent Search (For creators and consumers)

Digital processes supported by the specification enable content to be aggregated, indexed, and made easily available for discovery, licensing, and consumption.

3) License and Royalty Management

Digital processes supported by the specification that provide accurate, transparent processing and distribution of payments and royalties.

4) Marketplace Listing Engine

Digital processes supported by the specification enable digital content to be easily listed and placed for sale on major digital e-commerce platforms.

5) Immutable Transaction Ledgers

Digital processes supported by the specification ensure that all student experience records, all financial and licensing transactions, and any record of historical value be stored in a reliable, transparent, secure, and immutable manner.

C2E Work Plan

The successful realization of the C2E Ecosystem relies on the participation and commitment of stakeholders in various areas of business and practice. The wide acceptance and adoption of the specification can only be achieved through the organization of groups and individuals committed to the betterment of education on a global scale. Toward that end, Curriki is creating a coalition from which a steering committee and working groups will be formed that will guide and shape the direction of C2Es.

Among those organizations, Curriki is reaching out to:

• Content creators and educators
• Associations that represent parents and teachers
• Institutions of learning
• Entertainment and media companies
• Education media publishers
• Education technology providers
• Technology providers in various areas (security, fintech, AI/ML, infrastructure, etc.)

Curriki’s goal is to have formed a substantially strong coalition to begin work on defining and formalizing the specification, and to start modeling the C2E marketplace by September 2023. The following is a general schedule of activities leading to the launch  of the pilot:

C2E Roadmap

The graphic below depicts the roadmap leading to a C2E Pilot in September.