Helping Educators Find the Right Stuff

Marie Bjerede | O'Reilly Radar | November 15, 2011

Education innovation will require scalable, national, open, interoperable systems that support data feedback loops. At the recent State Education Technology Director's Association's (SETDA) Leadership Summit, the United States Department of Education launched the Learning Registry, a powerful step toward creating the ecosystem infrastructure that will enable such systems.

The Learning Registry addresses the problem of discoverability of education resources. There are countless repositories of fantastic educational content, from user-generated and curated sites to Open Education Resources to private sector publisher sites. Yet, with all this high-quality content available to teachers, it is still nearly impossible to find content to use with a particular lesson plan for a particular grade aligned to particular standards. Regrettably, it is often easier for a teacher to develop his own content than to find just the right thing on the Internet...