What is WatchKnow?

It will be a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest, currently under planning and development.  Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools.  WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that.  We will set the topics and invite teachers—and everyone—to submit videos.  Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we'll select a winner for each topic.  We'll pay the winner(s) within each topic small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet.  We might award substantially more for certain topics.  You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol.  The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education.  The project's Executive Director is Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of the Citizendium.

For future updates, please add yourself to the project announcement list.

How will it work?

For the beta project, we'll post around 500 topics.  Contributors will sign up and submit videos under any of those topics, and raters (anyone) can sign up and rate videos according to how well they get the concept across.  We'll place topics into a list according to how many videos have been submitted to them.  Once the most active topics have more than five video submissions apiece, we'll start picking winners.  Winners will be chosen based on a weighted score, with 50% of the score based on public ratings, and 50% of the score based on a panel of teachers who actually teach the subjects, and educational experts.  We can't go into many more details yet, because they haven't all been settled yet, but rest assured that we have many ideas and are consulting many people about them.