Getting started for Learning Providers



Steps to Onboard and Implement:

Decide which implementation works for you

Sign up through our onboarding form

Set yourself up or work with our teams to get you started


Overview

What major challenges is Navigator solving for you?

  1. You own your own data, and are given tools to leverage it, understand it and to make it work for you.

  2. You and your users gain a rapidly expanding, research-backed map of learning, and GPS-like tools to navigate it.

  3. You join a community built tool, built by fellow schools, researchers, educators and even students to solve your very real challenges. By working together, every challenge solved is shared with the whole ecosystem to the benefit of everyone!

What is Navigated Learning (NL)

Navigated Learning locates a learner’s current knowledge, interests and mindsets and based on their learning destination, provides a personalized pathway of activities and makes reroute suggestions based on performance until the learner reaches their learning destination.

Navigated Learning operationalizes learning principles using emerging ideas in artificial intelligence and data science, resulting in the continuous, real-time generation of students’ cognitive and non-cognitive data to support a teacher’s ability to customize instruction. In Navigated Learning, every aspect of the learning ecosystem and experience is aligned around learners gaining mastery in the various competencies they are expected to learn. Navigated Learning uses local curriculum standards to determine academic expectations and define proficiency in a given subject.

The Navigator functions as a GPS where learners are offered personalized turn-by-turn directions to reach their stated learning destination and are enabled by the data and learning science discussed above. At the same time, it provides all stakeholders (e.g. teachers, administrators, funders) real-time data to provide support and implement in-the-moment changes. It incorporates the science and math of understanding the learner and the learning space to locate a student's knowledge, skills and disposition, and navigates them to their learning destination with an adaptive, data-driven approach. As a data backbone, it brings transparency to all learning stakeholders and enables coordination and self-regulation to improve outcomes for all learners.

To ensure learners positive learning outcomes, we need a curated set of learning activities, a thorough understanding of the learner, and a system to suggest the activities to the learners using principles of learning. Gooru is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with the mission to honor the human right to education. Gooru, with inputs from its collaborators - researchers, content providers, implementers, technologists, and educators - has developed the Learning Navigator

EdTech companies can integrate the Navigator tools to accelerate learning outcomes with their applications. The following brief videos illustrate the product - a) Navigator Overview: An overview of Navigator’s four tools for Learners, Instructors, Administrators, and Content Providers; and b) Navigator for Mission Control: An overview of how stakeholders monitor and measure learning outcomes with Navigator for Mission Control’s real-time data dashboards; and c) Navigator Impact: Navigator tools are integrated by 11 partners to reach more than 6 million users across disciplines and geographies.


What tools are included with the Navigator for Technology Partners Package

Navigator for Learners

Helps your students improve their scores and gain mastery through Gooru’s full spectrum of activities, personalized interventions, and customized routes. They can view their progress on their individualized Skylines and see them grow as they master each concept.

Navigator for Instructors

Provides your teachers with resources to fill gaps within your existing curriculum and gives them real-time insights into each student in each class. They can engage students with media-rich content and suggest personalized learning activities.

Mission Control

allows administrators to access real-time data to coordinate and scale success. Everyone can feel confident in making data-informed decisions based on learning gains, learner performance across competency frameworks, and time spent on learning activities.

Navigator Library

With Navigator Library your teachers gain access to over 4 million open education resources across diverse authors, learning styles, and disciplines and can transform any curriculum into a Navigator course.

Navigator for Administrator

Lets the administrator set up a custom tenancy, roster users, and control other account settings for various roles and functionalities with precision.

Navigator Platform for Developers

Navigator Platform includes APIs and widgets that allows the curated catalog and Navigated Learning functionality to be integrated into any 3rd party application.

Navigator for Researchers

Navigator Research Portal enables researchers to enhance Navigator with their science and verify it for improved outcomes with lab-schools.


What can you do with Navigator

Navigator Works With Your Existing Content

We configure Navigator based on your preferences for standards and work with you to add all of your custom content to your individual space in Gooru. Through the Navigator Library tool, you will be able to monitor the use, engagement, and outcomes across all your users. You will develop competency frameworks tailored to your needs, by defining courses, grades, micro-credentials, as a set of competencies. Those competencies can then be aligned to local norms and standards to enable customized learning pathways for students.

Use Gooru Navigator Courses and Existing Content to Supplement Your Content

You have access to all open courses and millions of open educational resources on Navigator. All of our resources, assessments, and courses are aligned to competencies and tagged to assess Depth of Knowledge, create auto scored assessments or a rubric that can score offline free response activities.

Gooru provides you with Signature Assessments for Math, highly curated assessments that cover all micro-competencies and evaluate for a Depth of Knowledge level 2 or higher. When your learners score well on Signature Assessments, Navigator captures that proficiency and moves them forward in their learning journey.


Getting started

Decide which implementation works for you

While independent users or instructors could just start using Navigator simply by signing up, many learning providers have additional administrative, functional and reporting requirements. To address these requirements the Gooru community have developed Mission control, Navigator Library, Navigator Admin, Navigator for developers and Navigator for researchers. To gain access to these specialist tools you will either need to setup your own instance on your own servers, or have us host it for you.

Basic, self setup

  • Setup your own instance Visit our GitHub repo here

  • Create your own courses

  • Roster your learners

  • Comprehensive self service instructions are being developed.

$ FREE

Supported Setup

  • We setup your server

  • We support your onboarding requirements

  • We provide training to teachers and administrators

  • You gain access to premium courses and content.

Small per/user/year fee + setup Contact us for pricing.

Sign up through our onboarding form

Signing up will be a lot easier soon, for now, please email partner@gooru.org

Even if you are going to use the Self-service free option, please reach out and let us know how you will be using it. Consider joining the community as we all work together to solve each others challenges.


FAQ

General Steps in Implementation

  1. Decide Hosted Vs On Prem
    Navigator tools can be accessed as a hosted service on Gooru’s platform. Gooru will manage the operations and support of the tools. Alternately, Collaborators can choose to host the Navigator tools in their environments (called On-Premise hosting). On request, Gooru can support with netops for on-premise hosting.

  2. Train your staff
    Training is an important step in the successful implementation of Navigator. We highly recommend you to train your curriculum development, engineering, sales and implementation staff to be involved in training to use Navigated Learning

  3. Design Content and Competency Framework
    Navigator allows you to implement existing Navigator courses (currently Math Navigator designed as supplemental course with OER resources) or design your own courses from scratch or from existing content and courses on Navigator. Here are more details on existing content on Navigator and designing content on Navigator.

  4. Roster your Users and start implementing
    Start implementing a part of your course or complete course by rostering your users and giving them access to the course

  5. Provide Feedback
    Navigator is designed by you and for you. Your continuous feedback helps us improve the Navigator usability.

What should Implementation Partners (who will use services) be technically prepared for?

  • Partners need to have an understanding of SSO models and should be using an identity provisioning system that can be configured at Navigator for SSO flows.

  • Partners should be able to share their roster data in OneRoster standards format, or via ClassLink Roster API.

  • Partners should be able to understand competency based learning model, bring in the frameworks of interest and be able to map the frameworks to other similar frameworks.

  • Partners should be able to identify, create and curate content relevant to the competency model of interest; and be able to setup content working together with NLC.

Who collaborates with NLC?

  • Any entity interested in adopting and implementing Navigated Learning. This includes use of the Navigator tools and platform, adopting a competency based approach to learning and an interest in measuring learning Impact.

Is Navigator an authoring tool?

  • Learning Navigator is not an authoring tool, it only indexes content

  • Also, Navigator doesn’t store content; actual content resides in repositories like Google drive and other parts of the cloud

What happens when content resides in 2 different systems and there are constant metadata updates in Partner’s systems. Does metadata updates in partner’s systems need to be periodically updated in the Navigator?

  • Yes, this would be a necessity

How can Implementers be onboarded onto NLC?

  • Support Competency Framework development- includes Competency definition, Crosswalks, GUT, content development based on competencies

  • Rostering of their student/teacher users into Navigator classes

  • Course building to enable implementation

  • Product interface customisations, if any

  • Gather data on implementation

What does it mean to have tenancy on Navigator? What is sub-tenancy?

  • Tenancy setup at Navigator provides for isolation of content, identity and data. Partner can choose to bring their content for their private use; and restrict access to data for users within the partner group. Tenancy setup ensures this isolation. In addition, tenancy will support customization of Navigator to the extent of usage of specific competency model, framework, etc; and access to additional tenant level aggregate reports.

  • Sub-tenancy can be imagined as a controlled group within the tenant setup like a department requiring its own data isolation within the organization but access allowed to parent tenant users but not to peer departments. Sub-tenant, from a structure and setup perspective, is no different to a tenant.

What is the technology stack of Learning Navigator?

  • NLC embraces open-source technologies in realizing the Navigator and at a broad-level following are the guiding design principles used:

    • Microservices architecture for better scale

    • RESTful API with JSON responses to access core features

    • Consistent API design for ease of development

    • Open-source technologies at all layers of solution

    • Queuing over message bus for communication across microservices

    • Localization support

    • Scalable with minimum footprint

    • Deploy not tied to custom infrastructure

  • Consequently, the choice of technology reflects the same:

    • Ubuntu Linux OS is the choice of development and deploy environment

    • Java-based microservices implementation

    • Postgres database as primary data store

    • ElasticSearch extensions for search engine

    • Postgres based datastore for analytics data

    • Kafka as message bus for data relay across microservices

    • AWS hosting environment, leverage at infra-level and not custom services

    • Github for source code management

    • Atlassian Bamboo for CI/CD

    • Atlassian Jira for product backlog, releases and bug tracking

What is the source of Gooru content? Who authors Math Navigator?

  • In addition to the contributions of educators around the world, Gooru indexes and organizes millions of resources from more than 500 publishers that cover a range of K-12 topics such as math, science, English language arts, and social studies. Publisher sources include the Smithsonian, WolframMathWorld, the Library of Congress, National Geographic, PBS Kids, NBC Learn, Scholastic, ReadWriteThink, Time4Writing, and many more.

Are Gooru resources and courses aligned to state and national standards, and if so, which states and national standards are available?

Educators can easily find content by national Common Core Standards, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards (C3). Additional standards are in the works and customers can inquire directly to itslearning for updated availability and timetables.

How is quality implemented and assessed? What is the vetting or review process for content?

  • The Gooru catalog was originally scaffolded with content from highly recommended educational websites and then supplemented with resources acquired through content partnerships. Organizations such as the Schusterman Foundation, Cisco, The Hewlett Foundation, and Lockheed Martin provide funding and expert advice to support the creation of quality content.

  • Before they are added to Gooru, resources are vetted in a multi-step process. The Gooru team monitors newly uploaded resources to ensure the the content is appropriate and adheres to the "wiki" model, in which users share communal responsibility to keep Gooru safe and appropriate for student use. In addition, Gooru works to feature resources with significant educational value and without aggressive advertising.

What tool or rubric are you using for quality assurance of instructional materials?

Gooru courses have undergone a badging process to ensure they meet standards for content quality and that they support personalized learning and instruction. Resources are evaluated against the Gooru Quality Content Rubric, and are peer-reviewed to ensure the course is an exemplary representation of the district or organization that designed and implemented it.


Additional Resources and Documents

Gooru Executive Summary
Learning Maps for Navigator
Navigator Library Nexgen - Curating and Organizing Web-scale Resources
Exploring the Navigator Library