This week, Curriki’s Executive Director Bobbi Kurshan and I are in Doha, Qatar receiving the WISE Award for Innovation. This inaugural meeting of what will now be an annual event has brought together about 1000 thought leaders from five continents. Aimed at being a sort of Davos for education, the themes of the conference are “Pluralism, Sustainability and Innovation”.
The conference organizers have set up a booth for each of the six award winners where we’re each able to showcase the work our projects are doing and meet with a steady stream of conference attendees. Just like when I attend education conference back in the U.S., I’ve yet to get to a single conference sessions, because I’ve been busy meeting people and talking about how Curriki could be deployed in various regions of the world. My shirt pocket has a thick stack of business cards from an incredible gamut of education leaders, representing a virtual United Nations of interested potential partners. Specifically we’ve met leaders of non-profits from the UK and Paraguay; government officials from Thailand, the Philippines, Bahrain and Egypt; the founder and chief education officer of a wealthy and influential foundation in India; for-profit organizations from Malaysia and Jordan and reporters from Qatar, Hungary, Lebanon and the U.S. Come to think of it, we also met the Director of the Regional Bureau for Education in Africa for UNESCO who, along with her attaché expressed strong interested in using Curriki for a major teacher training effort in Senegal. Turns out some of the folks we’re meeting here represent the actual United Nations.
Meetings like this are important to Curriki because they give our tiny organization that has essentially no marketing budget a platform to present to a who’s who of global policy makers. The only way we can realize a vision of sharing open education resources around the world is to find partners who can take our platform and localize it, maintain it and drive usage. What comes next is the vital follow up. We don’t expect and frankly couldn’t handle it if each of the potential opportunities spawned a local Curriki instance. But like venture funding, you have to pitch a lot of deals if you want one or two to close.
I’ve long believed that in many respects, the need for a site like Curriki is far greater in the developing world than it is in the U.S. After the award ceremony, I’ll pack up and head back on a 14 ½ hour flight back to NY. Based on the week we’ve had, I suspect I’ll have a whole new set of opportunities to rack up frequent flyer miles.
Peter Levy
Strategic Development
Tags: Barbara Kurshan, Doha, Peter Levy, Qatar, WISE, World Innovation Summit for Education
