Textbook "digitization" / NCERT
In 2015-16, I connected with the Director of the Central Institute of Educational Technology of India's primary education body, the National Council of Educational Research and Training. There is no comparable organization of such power in the US; since education research and leadership is so decentralized. CIET was trying to digitize print-based books for the web, which served as the curriculum for tens of millions of children, but this process had been extremely difficult for them. I knew a fair bit about this problem, having tried to solve the same problem at Inkling. I volunteered to step in and consult; this was like an opportunity to save NCERT from having a healthcare.gov-like result, after a strong national commitment to making this happen by a tight deadline.
After some remote help in working with their book assets, I spent a couple of weeks working with their entire team during a winter. After spending a couple of days getting on a realistic picture of the challenges they were facing, I trained their team on a large amounts of aspects of working with textbook conversion processes and metadata for web-based environments, when coming from a desktop publishing background.
