About Endless OS Foundation
Our vision is simple: the whole world, empowered. Access to the digital tools of the modern era is a prerequisite for that vision to be realized.
The Endless OS Foundation exists to democratize access to technology to create opportunities for underserved and under-resourced populations around the world. We promote coding, education, livelihood, and digital agency for the public, particularly the youth and less advantaged around the world.
Current initiatives include:
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The Endless Key addresses the issue of internet access by bringing a great breadth and depth of high quality learning and discovery materials to students with limited or no internet access.
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The Endless Laptop addresses the issue of device access by employing a laptop with pre-installed productivity tools, apps and learning resources to increase PC equity in the USA and beyond and offering an affordable payment plan to participants.
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Our work on the GNOME Desktop ensures that we can bring an intuitive, excellently-designed Free and Open Source PC desktop experience to first-time PC users reached through our work.
The Foundation is a “remote-first” team of highly-skilled philanthropy and product specialists around the globe. We offer flexible working hours and locations as a matter of course. We are a friendly, mission-driven organization with a highly-engaged workforce and “can do” culture. Our team pulls together to solve big problems and drive towards our social impact goals.
Our Ideal Content Manager
Endless seeks to deliver high-quality educational content to those who have limited internet connectivity. Such content, consisting of video, audio and readable material, is made available on the Endless Key, Endless OS and the Endless Laptop, in addition to being made more widely available for other distribution contexts.
We are looking for a multi-talented Content Manager to own our content vision & strategy, and be in charge of obtaining and curating relevant educational content, working across 3 key areas:
- Content vision: Your knowledge and insight into the education world will be employed to develop our high-level strategy around acquiring the content with highest social impact for our target audiences.
- Content acquisition: Your communication & outreach skills will be employed to obtain relevant, valuable content from third parties, according to the overall strategy.
- Content ingestion & curation: In collaboration with our engineers and designers, your ability to go hands-on will be needed to add the content to our products, ensuring that it is presented in a delightful and engaging manner.
As the content challenges are tightly tied to our product development, this Content Manager will report to our Director of Apps within the Engineering team. However, to ensure the overall success of our initiatives, this role will additionally involve close collaboration with Endless’s Program Director.
Content vision - your Education Strategy skills
You’ll utilize your deep expertise in the education world to define our overall content strategy as our initiatives evolve. For example, for a K-12 audience of the Endless Key initiative, what is the most impactful STEAM content we should be shipping?
In addition to calling on your own expert insight you’ll seek guidance and feedback from the educators and students reached by our programs to guide our strategy accordingly.
You’ll need to become highly familiar with the content included in our library, including content that has been acquired prior to your arrival, and help refine and improve the selection on an ongoing basis.
The types of questions you’ll have to answer include:
- What content is missing from our offering? What content types or subjects should we add to our distribution? Which of these gaps should we focus on first?
- For a given target audience, what’s the best 100GB cut of our content library that we should distribute?
- As we bring in large content sources such as Wikipedia and wikiHow, what is the right filtering strategy to ensure that content inappropriate for young learners is excluded from our content distribution?
- What capabilities should we develop for rating and classifying content for different age groups?
- How should we handle internationalization of content, e.g. providing bilingual (English/Spanish) content selections for the US?
Content acquisition - your Communication & Outreach skills
The next step is to obtain appropriately licensed, high quality content, in alignment with the strategy. This includes video media, readable media (e.g. written articles, e-books) and interactive media (fillable PDFs, clickable exercises, educational games).
This content is to be acquired through reaching out to content creators and education publishers in order to obtain appropriate redistribution permission of their work. You may also pull on existing sources of freely available content. We aim to curate a healthy and varied mix of content from individual/independent creators, education-focused foundations, publishers, and other institutions.
In all but exceptional circumstances, we work with Creative Commons licensed content in order to utilize and grow the wider free content ecosystem as much as possible. Your outreach here will include persuading such creators and institutions to make some of their content available under such terms.
Content ingestion & curation
Having obtained strategy-aligned educational material, the content now needs to be ingested and processed into our library. The technical side of this process will be executed by our wider engineering team, however your close collaboration will be required in tagging, organizing and categorizing the content by subject, topic, age range, etc. This will involve you carefully constructing spreadsheets that index the content, as well as examining the ingestion results, and iterating as needed.
We regard usability with utmost importance; it is critical that the newly ingested content is made available in a delightful way. You’ll have to ensure the content is well presented, easily navigable, with appropriate thumbnails, and meeting Endless design standards. These activities will be supported by our graphic designers and wider team, however any graphic design know-how, design sense, and attention to detail that you can offer will directly contribute to our overall success.
Required Skills and Experience
- Background in instructional design, online content creation and/or online learning for K-12 learners
- Experience setting or guiding the overall strategy for an educational organization or initiative
- Familiarity with e-learning platforms
- Basic understanding of content licensing, particularly Creative Commons
- Able to work with content providers on the visual display and presentation of their content
- Attention to detail
- Strong problem solving, communication, and prioritization skills
- An enthusiastic, independent, proactive, flexible, and cooperative approach to getting work done
- Friendly and patient manner
- Motivated by open source software ideals and the power of community
Preferred Skills and Experience
- A Bachelor’s degree or higher in related field, or equivalent work experience
- Digital graphics design experience with an eye for visuals
- Basic programming/coding/scripting experience
- Familiarity with Kolibri learning platform
- Experience working with nonprofits or social enterprises
- Experience working with K-12 schools, educational institutions, educators and/or content creators based in the United States.
Endless is an Equal Opportunity Employer
Endless provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.