Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report - S11

EDUCATION WEEK:DIGITAL CURRICULA > www.edweek.org/go/digital-report

tent, available for K-12 science and
middle school social studies.
“Video has always been a big
part of our service, certainly,” said
Scott Kinney, a senior vice president of the company, which has
partly, but not entirely, built its
content from resources created
by its parent company, Discovery
Communications.
“We’re fortunate to have a parent
company that is rich with media,
and at the same time, we don’t necessarily start there and back into a
service,” Mr. Kinney said.
Similarly, Wynnewood, Pa.based Safari Montage has from
its inception in 2005 worked to
move from its reputation as a
provider of on-demand educational video only to one featuring
a variety of digital media.
On the other end of the spectrum,
Shmoop, based in Los Altos, Calif.,
has long been a provider of digital
learning guides both for students’
core academic studies and for Advanced Placement and college-readiness exams, but it more recently
has migrated toward video.
Shmoop’s president and ceo,
Ellen Siminoff, said her company
now offers 1,000 videos across those
subjects. And based in part on experience with the expected release
this coming fall of shmoocs—the
company’s take on “massively open
online courses”—she expects video
content to eventually account for
about a third of the company’s online curriculum offerings.
“It becomes a necessary component,” said Ms. Siminoff, whose
company offers many resources
free to individual users, but sells
services to districts.

FREE
REPOSITORIES
While many companies follow
Shmoop’s lead in providing a
large portion of their resources
for free, the growth of completely
free video repositories, from nonprofit organizations such as the
Khan Academy, is also giving
those providers an increasing
stake in the formal education
market.
The Khan Academy currently
boasts more than 4,000 short
educational videos across science,
math, economics, computer science, and the humanities. Some
educators have used them to
“flip” their classrooms: Students
watch the videos at home to get
conceptual basics, freeing up inclass time for practice, discussion,
and revision.
L i k e w i s e, t h e A n n e n b e r g
Learner website offers free videos

targeted to high school academic
subjects as part of its range of online educational services supported
by the Annenberg Foundation. The
nonprofit Annenberg Learner also
offers a range of professional-development videos for preservice and
in-service teachers.
More recently, the New York
City-based nonprofit ted, which
uses video and live events to

spread emerging ideas and practices in many sectors, launched
its educational channel in March
2012. The channel allows users
to edit or alter any of its featured
videos as well as create their own
educational content based on any
YouTube video.
All three nonprofits offer some
guidance to educators about how
their resources might be used in

schools. The Khan Academy has
also run pilot studies on schools
that are using its content and
how that use is affecting student
learning.
But, in general, educators have
much more leeway, and also much
more responsibility, to choose video
resources they see as most useful and effective than they did in
the past when choosing print re-

PERSONALIZED

LANGUAGE LEARNING.
Blend well for academic success.

MAY 22, 2013

S11

sources only.
“We are implicitly trusting our
users, whether they’re students or
teachers, to choose what is going
to be the most helpful for them,
and we think that’s the right role
for us,” said Shantanu Sinha, the
Khan Academy’s president and
ceo. “We want to empower you, but
we’re not going to tell you exactly
what to do.” n

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Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report