Google could provide a fantastic K-12 curriculum for approximately $200 million.Why would they want to?
Well, for starters, most kids use the web as an adjunct to their existing school efforts anyway and most use Google as the starting point for locating resources to help them. Google can formalize this by building a mirror K-12 curriculum.
This is an interesting idea, although one that I find unlikely to occur. I do not see Google as a content creator to any degree. They’ve tried to focus around areas in which other people create and host content from which they can generate relative advertisements with. This is not to say that Google will not create an easy-to-use interface (e.g. Google Base) that allows independent educators to design curriculum, there are after all thousands of employees playing around with ideas there. My question however is, why wait for them to do it?
If you’re familiar with the term “mash-upâ€? (combining multiple services like Craigslist and Google Maps), perhaps someone could do just this with OCW, podcasts, etc. The biggest stumbling block (aside from implementation) would be “copyrightâ€? material, and that is not something to ignore.