Learning Registry is a joint initiative by a number of federal organizations of the United States, including Department of Education, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House
and the Federal Communications Commission.
It is a project to collect data about all of the best learning content in the world and then make it available for people to build tools on top of that, to recommend the right content to the right teacher or student for exactly what they need and when they need it.
Learning Registry aims to make learning resources, wherever they are stored, easier to find, access and easier to integrate into learning environments around the world. The Learning Registry will enable teachers, students, parents, schools, governments, corporations and non-profit organizations to build and access better, more interconnected and personalized learning solutions needed for a 21st century education.
It aspires to fulfill this purpose by identifying and implementing existing technologies and interfaces, as well as exposing learning resources to search engines so they are easily discoverable and accessible. Through this, one will not only be able to access federal resources, but also find consistent methods for accessing learning resources, regardless of the source or provider. The end result will be a network of federal and all other resources that can be used in a wide variety of applications, including textbooks, open educational resources, mobile applications and online learning products.
Other goals that Learning Registry wishes to attain are:
To aggregate and cross-walk metadata (classifying information about each resource) between agencies, so that a single search can turn up relevant resources from all agencies.
To build on social networking concepts, by allowing anyone to add additional metadata about the resources without having to run their metadata by anyone else first. This concept is also known as metadata augmentation.
To create usage-based metadata (Paradata ) to be publishable and findable within the network.
To develop the system to be very scalable and have high performance.
Here’s how Learning Registry functions:
With large collections of learning resources online, there’s a burden of locating these resources, assessing their quality, connecting them to related resources, and sharing them with others. The Learning Registry makes all of these activities easier by:
Aggregating metadata– data about the learning resources available online, including the publisher, location, content area, standards alignment, ratings, reviews and more.
Developers use its open source platform to create the tools educators need.
Publishers make data about online educational content available to the Learning Registry.
Digital learning resources can now be consumed in a smart, efficient and social way by educators, students or anyone who seeks them.
To use Learning Registry, enter whatever you want to search for in the simple search engine. You can filter your resource search by clicking on the ‘Federal Resources Only’ checkbox. You can also browse by Subject (Arts & Music, Science, Math, etc.) or by Standard (Common Core Mathematics, Science Education Standards, etc.). A list of results is displayed, with the source and original link. Click on a result to view its screenshot and summary. Here, you can also view its Metadata and go to the original resource with a single click.
The ways in which Learning Registry benefits you are:
It makes it much easier to find and access the resources stored in the Federal Government or any other resources in general. You can always benefit by finding resources stored in the Federal Government.
It makes information for education use available to students and teachers online and demarcates the public’s right to use, modify, and distribute the information.
It allows others to participate and innovate beyond what it does.
With Metadata Augmentation (its greatest feature by far) it enables websites, users, learning management systems and others to classify, rate, review and re-publish federal resources in way that helps more people find the resources most useful for their needs.
Hence, Learning Registry strives with success to publish its resources along with as much information about them as possible for the community to make use of them in whatever way that makes sense to its users.
I request you to keep in touch with Learning Registry as you come up with ideas or resources that can lead to their betterment. I think this project has the huge potential to make a difference for teachers and students, as well as the companies, non-profits, school districts, states and others who support education.
