Projects

The beta version of the Universal Education Search is available for testing.

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 needed 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 have tested out possible solutions to the “search problem.”

In addition to the Universal Education Search, we are hosting several existing search portals for educational resources, as can be seen in the “Search” tab.

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

• We have built 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 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 are not 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 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 has developed 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 also worked with several other interested organizations in trying out other models and leveraging existing resources and expertise wherever possible.
• We will allow the search results to be visualized in a customizable interface.