Projects

One of the more interesting and pressing problems facing users of the Internet is quickly finding and evaluating the resources they seek. Clearly, this is a problem not limited to education, but given that the top concern for most educators (and learners, for that matter) is lack of time, we need to design more efficient and effective ways of identifying educational resources online. In collaboration with other open educational projects, and with several major search companies, we are testing out possible solutions to the “search problem.”

At a minimum, we are planning to host several existing search portals for educational resources, as can be seen in the “Search” tab.

This project continues to evolve, but here are the major elements to date. More comprehensive analyses and calls for community participation are forthcoming.

• We are building an archive of links and annotations to accessible educational materials on the web. “Accessible” means that it can be read for free, without a need for a password or login, on the Internet. Any presumptively educational material is acceptable, including commercial materials, non-textual resources (e.g., computer programs, video lectures, etc), as long as someone is willing to vouch for the material as being educational in nature (see note on “curators”, below). The resulting archive is being specified in a well documented (and open) format so that anyone can take advantage of the information within. Although this project is designed to promote OER, the contents of the educational archive will not be limited to OER; thus, we are referring to the project as “Universal Education Search” for clarity.
• We accept pointers to any materials, though materials will only be included via “curators” (organizations or people). We define curators to include any organization that is willing to indicate that the contributed material belongs in an open archive of educational resources. In other words, ccLearn is not going to be the final arbiter of quality or appropriateness; instead, we will trust that curating organizations or individuals are evaluating and refining the resources they submit. Further details on the logic of this approach and the ways in which curators can join in will follow soon.
• The resulting archive, as already stated, is available for anyone to use (for search or otherwise). ccLearn is developing a combination full-text (based on a web-crawling process) and metadata-aware search product that we believe will do a good job of identifying appropriate resources according to a user’s needs. But we are also working with several other interested organizations to try out other models and leverage existing resources and expertise wherever possible.
• We are planning to allow the search results will be visualized in a customizable interface. We are constructing one such interface, but we are also in conversation with several other organizations that are interested in building out their own UIs to meet the specific needs of their audiences.

This project has many different elements to its near- and long-term development, and we are hoping to be able to work closely with any number of other organizations to build it out to new needs and scale it up internationally. Watch this space for additional details and updates as plans progress.