Siyavula
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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Siyavula is a for-profit educational-technology company that creates textbooks and integrated learning experiences. Founded in 2012 in South Africa.
Revenue model: charging for custom services, sponsorships
Interview date: April 5, 2016
Interviewee: Mark Horner, CEO
Profile written by Paul Stacey
Openness is a key principle for Siyavula. They believe that every learner and teacher should have access to high-quality educational resources, as this forms the basis for long-term growth and development. Siyavula has been a pioneer in creating high-quality open textbooks on mathematics and science subjects for grades 4 to 12 in South Africa.
In terms of creating an open business model that involves Creative Commons, Siyavula — and its founder, Mark Horner — have been around the block a few times. Siyavula has significantly shifted directions and strategies to survive and prosper. Mark says it’s been very organic.
It all started in 2002, when Mark and several other colleagues at the University of Cape Town in South Africa founded the Free High School Science Texts project. Most students in South Africa high schools didn’t have access to high-quality, comprehensive science and math textbooks, so Mark and his colleagues set out to write them and make them freely available.
As physicists, Mark and his colleagues were advocates of open-source software. To make the books open and free, they adopted the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License.1 They chose LaTeX, a typesetting program used to publish scientific documents, to author the books. Over a period of five years, the Free High School Science Texts project produced math and physical-science textbooks for grades 10 to 12.
In 2007, the Shuttleworth Foundation offered funding support to make the textbooks available for trial use at more schools. Surveys before and after the textbooks were adopted showed there were no substantial criticisms of the textbooks’ pedagogical content. This pleased both the authors and Shuttleworth; Mark remains incredibly proud of this
accomplishment.
But the development of new textbooks froze at this stage. Mark shifted his focus to rural schools, which didn’t have textbooks at all, and looked into the printing and distribution options. A few sponsors came on board but not enough to meet the need.
In 2007, Shuttleworth and the Open Society Institute convened a group of open-education activists for a small but lively meeting in Cape Town. One result was the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, a statement of principles, strategies, and commitment to help the open-education movement grow.2 Shuttleworth also invited Mark to run a project writing open content for all subjects for K–12 in English. That project became Siyavula.
They wrote six original textbooks. A small publishing company offered Shuttleworth the option to buy out the publisher’s existing K–9 content for every subject in South African schools in both English and Afrikaans. A deal was struck, and all the acquired content was licensed with Creative Commons, significantly expanding the collection beyond the six original books.
Mark wanted to build out the remaining curricula collaboratively through communities of practice — that is, with fellow educators and writers. Although sharing is fundamental to teaching, there can be a few challenges when you create educational resources collectively. One concern is legal. It is standard practice in education to copy diagrams and snippets of text, but of course this doesn’t always comply with copyright law. Another concern is transparency. Sharing what you’ve authored means everyone can see it and opens you up to criticism. To alleviate these concerns, Mark adopted a team-based approach to authoring and insisted the curricula be based entirely on resources with Creative Commons licenses, thereby ensuring they were safe to share and free from legal repercussions.
Not only did Mark want the resources to be shareable, he wanted all teachers to be able to remix and edit the content. Mark and his team had to come up with an open editable format and provide tools for editing. They ended up putting all the books they’d acquired and authored on a platform called Connexions.3 Siyavula trained many teachers to use Connexions, but it proved to be too complex and the textbooks were rarely edited.
Then the Shuttleworth Foundation decided to completely restructure its work as a foundation into a fellowship model (for reasons completely unrelated to Siyavula). As part of that transition in 2009–10, Mark inherited Siyavula as an independent entity and took ownership over it as a Shuttleworth fellow.
Mark and his team experimented with several different strategies. They tried creating an authoring and hosting platform called Full Marks so that teachers could share assessment items. They tried creating a service called Open Press, where teachers could ask for open educational resources to be aggregated into a package and printed for them. These services never really panned out.
Then the South African government approached Siyavula with an interest in printing out the original six Free High School Science Texts (math and physical-science textbooks for grades 10 to 12) for all high school students in South Africa. Although at this point Siyavula was a bit discouraged by open educational resources, they saw this as a big opportunity.
They began to conceive of the six books as having massive marketing potential for Siyavula. Printing Siyavula books for every kid in South Africa would give their brand huge exposure and could drive vast amounts of traffic to their website. In addition to print books, Siyavula could also make the books available on their website, making it possible for learners to access them using any device — computer, tablet, or mobile phone.
Mark and his team began imagining what they could develop beyond what was in the textbooks as a service they charge for. One key thing you can’t do well in a printed textbook is demonstrate solutions. Typically, a one-line answer is given at the end of the book but nothing on the process for arriving at that solution. Mark and his team developed practice items and detailed solutions, giving learners plenty of opportunity to test out what they’ve learned. Furthermore, an algorithm could adapt these practice items to the individual needs of each learner. They called this service Intelligent Practice and embedded links to it in the open textbooks.
The costs for using Intelligent Practice were set very low, making it accessible even to those with limited financial means. Siyavula was going for large volumes and wide-scale use rather than an expensive product targeting only the high end of the market.
The government distributed the books to 1.5 million students, but there was an unexpected wrinkle: the books were delivered late. Rather than wait, schools who could afford it provided students with a different textbook. The Siyavula books were eventually distributed, but with well-off schools mainly using a different book, the primary market for Siyavula’s Intelligent Practice service inadvertently became low-income learners.
Siyavula’s site did see a dramatic increase in traffic. They got five hundred thousand visitors per month to their math site and the same number to their science site. Two-fifths of the traffic was reading on a “feature phone” (a nonsmartphone with no apps). People on basic phones were reading math and science on a two-inch screen at all hours of the day. To Mark, it was quite amazing and spoke to a need they were servicing.
At first, the Intelligent Practice services could only be paid using a credit card. This proved problematic, especially for those in the low-income demographic, as credit cards were not prevalent. Mark says Siyavula got a harsh business-model lesson early on. As he describes it, it’s not just about product, but how you sell it, who the market is, what the price is, and what the barriers to entry are.
Mark describes this as the first version of Siyavula’s business model: open textbooks serving as marketing material and driving traffic to your site, where you can offer a related service and convert some people into a paid customer.
For Mark a key decision for Siyavula’s business was to focus on how they can add value on top of their basic service. They’ll charge only if they are adding unique value. The actual content of the textbook isn’t unique at all, so Siyavula sees no value in locking it down and charging for it. Mark contrasts this with traditional publishers who charge over and over again for the same content without adding value.
Version two of Siyavula’s business model was a big, ambitious idea — scale up. They also decided to sell the Intelligent Practice service to schools directly. Schools can subscribe on a per-student, per-subject basis. A single subscription gives a learner access to a single subject, including practice content from every grade available for that subject. Lower subscription rates are provided when there are over two hundred students, and big schools have a price cap. A 40 percent discount is offered to schools where both the science and math departments subscribe.
Teachers get a dashboard that allows them to monitor the progress of an entire class or view an individual learner’s results. They can see the questions that learners are working on, identify areas of difficulty, and be more strategic in their teaching. Students also have their own personalized dashboard, where they can view the sections they’ve practiced, how many points they’ve earned, and how their performance is improving.
Based on the success of this effort, Siyavula decided to substantially increase the production of open educational resources so they could provide the Intelligent Practice service for a wider range of books. Grades 10 to 12 math and science books were reworked each year, and new books created for grades 4 to 6 and later grades 7 to 9.
In partnership with, and sponsored by, the Sasol Inzalo Foundation, Siyavula produced a series of natural sciences and technology workbooks for grades 4 to 6 called Thunderbolt Kids that uses a fun comic-book style.4 It’s a complete curriculum that also comes with teacher’s guides and other resources.
Through this experience, Siyavula learned they could get sponsors to help fund openly licensed textbooks. It helped that Siyavula had by this time nailed the production model. It cost roughly $150,000 to produce a book in two languages. Sponsors liked the social-benefit aspect of textbooks unlocked via a Creative Commons license. They also liked the exposure their brand got. For roughly $150,000, their logo would be visible on books distributed to over one million students.
The Siyavula books that are reviewed, approved, and branded by the government are freely and openly available on Siyavula’s website under an Attribution-NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND) — NoDerivs means that these books cannot be modified. Non-government-branded books are available under an Attribution license (CC BY), allowing others to modify and redistribute the books.
Although the South African government paid to print and distribute hard copies of the books to schoolkids, Siyavula itself received no funding from the government. Siyavula initially tried to convince the government to provide them with five rand per book (about US35¢). With those funds, Mark says that Siyavula could have run its entire operation, built a community-based model for producing more books, and provide Intelligent Practice for free to every child in the country. But after a lengthy negotiation, the government said no.
Using Siyavula books generated huge savings for the government.
Providing students with a traditionally published grade 12 science or math textbook costs around 250 rand per book (about US$18). Providing the Siyavula version cost around 36 rand (about $2.60), a savings of over 200 rand per book. But none of those savings were passed on to Siyavula. In retrospect, Mark thinks this may have turned out in their favor as it allowed them to remain independent from the government.
Just as Siyavula was planning to scale up the production of open textbooks even more, the South African government changed its textbook policy. To save costs, the government declared there would be only one authorized textbook for each grade and each subject. There was no guarantee that Siyavula’s would be chosen. This scared away potential sponsors.
Rather than producing more textbooks, Siyavula focused on improving its Intelligent Practice technology for its existing books. Mark calls this version three of Siyavula’s business model — focusing on the technology that provides the revenue-generating service and generating more users of this service. Version three got a significant boost in 2014 with an investment by the Omidyar Network (the philanthropic venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his spouse), and continues to be the model Siyavula uses today.
Mark says sales are way up, and they are really nailing Intelligent Practice. Schools continue to use their open textbooks. The government-announced policy that there would be only one textbook per subject turned out to be highly contentious and is in limbo.
Siyavula is exploring a range of enhancements to their business model. These include charging a small amount for assessment services provided over the phone, diversifying their market to all English-speaking countries in Africa, and setting up a consortium that makes Intelligent Practice free to all kids by selling the nonpersonal data Intelligent Practice collects.
Siyavula is a for-profit business but one with a social mission. Their shareholders’ agreement lists lots of requirements around openness for Siyavula, including stipulations that content always be put under an open license and that they can’t charge for something that people volunteered to do for them. They believe each individual should have access to the resources and support they need to achieve the education they deserve. Having educational resources openly licensed with Creative Commons means they can fulfill their social mission, on top of which they can build revenue-generating services to sustain the ongoing operation of Siyavula. In terms of open business models, Mark and Siyavula may have been around the block a few times, but both he and the company are stronger for it.
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