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.
The Learning Registry is a joint Department of Education + Department of Defense project to provide a common infrastructure for providing discoverable metadata for OER. The goal is to help the teacher locate the “just right” education content that is freely available on the web. Rather than just being yet another portal the Learning Registry is designed as infrastructure with community members running registry nodes that feed metadata and paradata back to other nodes all via a set of open APIs.
This seems like an excellent step toward solving the discovery problem that seems to plague OER. It also presents a opportunity for folks creating OER in the law school community to create a Learning Registry node for law school OER.
