Have you ever heard of the Learning Registry? I hadn’t until recently. Here’s an O’Reilly article about it from last November.
If the Learning Registry is more fully developed and populated with content, students and teachers all over the U.S. will have easy access to all the best online resources that map to any of the Common Core State Standards for education. Actually, the Learning Registry is not limited to common core and I suppose it isn’t limited to K-12 either. Any educational content (free or premium) can be added to the Learning Registry. Think of it as a universal card catalog to all online education content, with community ratings on the quality of the resource.
One way to see how this could work is to imagine an effort to organize all the thousands of individual teacher Pinterest boards that already list education resources: http://goo.gl/WRESh
These resources can all be connected to grade level learning objectives for Kindergarten through 12th grade, and then easily browsed by teachers and students.
(Who knew that Pinterest could play such a massive role in online education?!?!)
At a recent event in Washington, DC I had the privilege of meeting with dozens of people from education tech companies, private foundations, and others who care about improving education.
I ended up on a small task force whose project is to “Turbo Charge The Learning Registry. “Our team consists of about 15 people, including individuals from multi-billion dollar companies, philanthropic foundations, and startup Ed Tech companies. I am helping to coordinate the work on this project.
Our goal is to make the Learning Registry more well known, easier to use, easier to add resources to, and more easily integrated with other learning management systems. We want to make sure all the best online resources are added to the Learning Registry. This is going to take a lot of crowdsourcing! We need coders to help us with various aspects of this project and community organizers to help us organize the crowdsourcing aspects of the project, and of course teachers who can help us find the best online resources (videos, slideshows, animations, and other teaching materials) and add them to the Learning Registry.
We hope the end result is a wonderful learning resource that can be used by millions of students and teachers.
If you are a 1) coder 2) community organizer, or 3) teacher who wants to help contribute to this project, please comment below and fill out our Volunteer Survey form.
One thought on “Turbo Charge the Learning Registry”
(sorry if the comment is duplicate, not sure if you got the previous comment)
Over the last 1.5 years, I was helping build a small mobile learning startup in India. During that stint, I envisioned a giant folksonomy engine which would help deliver curated, contextual, current and popular content from the internet. The engine would semantically study (using bots, crowdsourcing, etc) every content on Internet, and map it to a global learning objective framework or taxonomy (Bloom’s Taxonomy). The local education agencies would already have their learning objectives customized (a la inheritance in programming) – All usage statistics will be crowdsourced from all providers initially, but later channeled through this 1 engine.
We didn’t develop that yet when I left, but now after reading about Learning Registry, I feel we should have integrated with LR. I wish I had known about LR earlier!
The biggest problem with LR will be adoption. Even if the US Govt mandates it, that will only lead to adoption within US. But this registry approach should be adopted globally, to truly utilize the power of the Internet, and its digital content warehouses. This should be brought under a group like ICANN or may be even under the HTML5 footprint, so that it becomes a de-facto standard for online content later on.
I would like to read more about LR and even help Turbo Charge it! Question is – where should I start?