Curriki was founded originally to deliver
the largest repository of open education resources.
Open-source to me was always about sharing.
It was mankind versus any particular company effort.
And on truly enabling technologies like CurrikiStudio is,
I think it's very important that it be free and open.
Curriki is building a movement that will fundamentally change
the way education experiences can be delivered to students.
Open Innovation Labs are an open-source processes
and methodology residency.
Our objective is to grow the team’s capabilities
by co-creating innovative solutions
around their challenges and opportunities.
We focus on how you work together.
And what we say generally is in labs:
“we are not going to buy your fish,
but we are going to tell you how to fish.”
One of the first things we do is really 00:01:00,520 --> 00:01:02,680 set about a bit of social contracting.
So the team gets together and decides
how they're going to work together.
We had a very geographically distributed team,
so trying to agree on the core working hours is actually
quite hard when you've got lots of time zones.
Everything was quite interactive,
so we started from different kinds of fun activities,
playing different kinds of guessing games.
Then we started integrating into the labs much better.
We really put our problems and our goals on the table.
So, after a couple of days we were able to know
what we really wanted to achieve in this lab.
We went through a very structured but friendly exercise
in being able to take our applications and convert them
into individual units that can be delivered.
When we were okay with our architecture,
then we started actually coding the application.
The session was quite collaborative.
I think my favorite moment was the team
mobbing together and thrashing out problems
and then learning together about the solution.
And certainly, the team found it really enjoyable,
and I think they're going to continue on with that practice.
It has been an amazing experience as far as the velocity,
the speed at which we have progressed.
We have ‘aha’ moments every single day and our team
has the ability to switch the way that they think.
In this lab we learned new technologies,
like the Red Hat OpenShift platform.
That was a new technology for us.
By the time we were finishing,
the developers want to do operations work,
like DevOps work, and vice versa.
They feel comfortable moving out of their comfort zones,
and that actually helps them grow.
I think that is the number one thing.
We started doing the rehearsals two days before,
everyone was so excited about what we achieved
over the 28 days.
I will be perfectly honest, I was very nervous at the beginning,
but the team was feeling so confident with their skills
that it showed during the demonstration.
I believe it built a lot of confidence
with the Curriki board of directors.
We focus on solving a business challenge
and how the team can take a business problem
and drive their way to convert it into a solution
and how to build and deliver the solution
so that the business can see a measurable impact.
We look at this more as a beginning than an ending.
There is a lot of work that is remaining.
The whole open culture concept that Red Hat brought
to the table and some of the tools for collaboration
were the real secret sauce that we are going to
start applying as we move forward.
Being part of the Open Innovation Labs residency program
has been absolutely fundamental for us.
We took six months of work and got it done in six weeks
with a really, really strong team.
And using the OpenShift technology, we have now made
our platform very simple to set up and install
on all of the major cloud platforms.
We have reliability, scalability, availability,
productivity, efficiency built into this thing.
The implementation help that Red Hat and the innovation team
has given us has been invaluable and I think
it will help every learner in the world, down the road.