Navigator technology includes four tools and a platform. Navigator for Learners provides a GPS-like experience for Learners. Navigator for Instructors enables instructors to track learner progress and provide personalized interventions. Navigator Mission Control provides real-time data to administrators and all stakeholders, so they can see what's working and scale success. Navigator Library supports content coordinators to develop competency frameworks and migrate their curriculum into Navigator courses. Math Navigator is a supplemental math course that utilizes the tools of the Learning Navigator. It helps learners develop the foundational knowledge, skills, and thought processes required to be successful in 2nd to 9th-grade math and better prepare for more advanced mathematics and STEM careers. Learners move from 2nd grade to HS math with a full spectrum of standards aligned resources and assessments. Navigator Library includes an open curated catalog of over 1M math resources and a math course that covers grades 2-10 in the United States. Navigator platform with APIs and widgets, brings the curated catalog and navigated learning functionality that can be integrated into 3rd party applications. Navigator integrates research to practice enabling researchers to enhance Navigator with their science and verify for improved outcomes with lab-schools. By interacting with these experts, Gooru brings strong foundations in learning sciences, artificial intelligence, and education practice to the Navigator. Current innovation partners include researchers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, Drexel University, and IIIT-Bangalore as well as five lab schools in the United States and two districts in India. All innovation is supported by funders such as Cisco, Hewlett Foundation, NSF, and the United States Department of Defense.

Practitioners in the learning ecosystem including educators, curriculum developers, and implementers use Navigator to validate the science, technology, and practice for outcomes. Content providers validate the engagement and efficacy of their open and premium content. Schools validate their current practices for learning gains with the Navigator. Practitioners have unlimited use of Navigator for their cohorts, and interact with the collaborative through newsletters and at conferences to validate and evolve the efficacy of their learning practices. Current practitioners include content providers such as Gyan Prakash Foundation, MERLOT, and SkillsCommons; implementers such as India Education Collective; and IMS Global.

Gooru packages Navigator tools, so partners can integrate these tools into their applications to bring navigated learning to millions of diverse learners across disciplines, geographies, and learning abilities. Gooru’s partners integrate the curated Navigator catalog of OER, or white-label Math Navigator into their services or enable instructors to monitor learner proficiency against local standards and personalize intervention, or provide actionable insights to admins so they can scale success. Several edtech companies in the US, the Government of India, and the US Department of Defense currently partner with Gooru. To date, eleven partners have integrated the Navigator tools and reached over six million learners across K-12, Higher Ed, Skills Training, and Professional Learning. Navigator tools work across technology levels of users, discipline of learning, and language of instruction.

Gooru has established a Navigated Learning Collaborative (NLC) with Innovators, Practitioners, and Partners collectively referred to as Collaborators. Navigator is open and free for all students and teachers around the world. Practitioners and Partners pay an annual membership fee to use Mission Control tool for admins and the Library tool for curriculum coordinators. Collaborators incorporate the cost of hosting and support for their users into their operations enabling the use of Navigator to scale across geographies and disciplines.

Gooru has an unwavering commitment to a vision of social justice at scale. Social justice to us means equal access to outcomes — not just resources or opportunities. Gooru takes a no-excuses approach toward our vision that every learner, regardless of their circumstances, deserves to achieve strong learning outcomes. As a result, we are focused on ensuring that the Navigator is accessible and effective with all types of learners in all locations worldwide regardless of the technology infrastructure, discipline of learning, availability of technology infrastructure, and language of instruction, in their environments. We believe that every individual deserves meaningful, high-quality, individualized opportunities to learn and succeed.

Navigator is being used by over six million (6M+) learners in K12, Higher Ed, Skills Training and Professional Learning. Leadership Public Schools (LPS) “demonstrated average learning gains in Math of 2.82 times the national growth norm, as measured by NWEA MAP” during a single year (Christensen Institute, 2016). This has now been observed for four years in a row. In the US, we reach over 3.06M K12 & Skills learners. In India, the Navigator is being piloted in two states of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra with 200,000 primary school students, in two India languages (Hindi and Marathi respectively). This will expand to over 10M students with complete statewide implementation. Currently, partners implement the Navigator for training in the US DoD, reach over 3M spoken english learners in India and Thailand, learning and development for engineers in a large silicon valley software company, and skills training in Morocco.

Gooru’s distributed team (across the US and India) is focused on collaborating on research, developing the technology, and enabling partners to scale impact. Gooru generates its support from philanthropic foundations, joint research proposals with research collaborators, and membership from practitioners and partners. Gooru Board, Leadership and Advisors include:

• Dr. Prasad Ram, Founder, Gooru, Google Engineering, Yahoo Engineering and Xerox Research

• Dr. Michelle Newstadt, Director of Research and Innovation at Gooru

• Prof. Nancy Songer, Dean, School of Education, Drexel University

• Prof. Gerald Hanley, Associate Dean, California State University, Director of MERLOT and Skills Commons

• Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, Data Scientist, Dean of Research, IIIT-Bangalore, India

• Ms Sreeja, Ashoka Fellow, CEO of India Education Collective (25+ years in operation)

• Mr Daljit Mirchandani, Chairman of GIF, CEO Gyan Prakash; Former CEO of Ingersoll-Rand

• Prof. Kenji Hakuta, Emeritus Professor, School of Education, Stanford University

• Dr. Michelle Rodriguez, Superintendent, Pajaro Valley Unified School District

Navigator and Mission Control for Researchers is designed to provide academics and experts real-time data to conduct research in any learning discipline in K-12 learning and beyond. The goal is to connect researchers with Navigated Learning Collaborative (NLC) members. For example, researchers interested in teaching and learning practices that utilize real-time data and suggestions can be introduced to Lab schools innovating with Navigator or other implementers supporting validation efforts. These districts and implementation sites can give researchers the privileges to see anonymized data within Mission Control.

Researchers can utilize all aspects of the Navigator tool that integrates research and practice to accelerate their research in the learning, data, cognitive, and computer sciences. and mentorship for early to mid career academics. By integrating research and practice, the two inform each other at each stage in the research and product development cycle. It creates a closed loop information gathering approach to validate the data and learning science that informs the system and product design and moves the academic fields forward with rich, large learning data sets. It establishes a rich environment for transdisciplinary convergence research. Researchers from all disciplines can work together on major research projects to better unpack the complexities of learning. Moreover, the research conducted using Navigator data can seed projects that will enhance grant applications to continue to innovate tools and move research fields forward.

Once researchers have established a working relationship and permission from an NLC member, they will have access to Mission Control for Researchers. Mission Control for Researchers will be designed as an easy to use dashboard experience to give researchers from any discipline access to evidence of learning across disciplines, learners, and geographies. Data scientists can have access to Big Data to train algorithms to enhance the curation and suggestion logic or to propose more efficient learning pathways. Education researchers in Math, ELA, Science, etc can see data on how students interact with a full spectrum of learning resources and assessments and explore characteristics of productive learners. Learning scientists can explore which learning principles are more effective to promote learning and cognitive psychologists can access data on student decision-making to look at motivation and perseverance in conjunction with cognitive knowledge and skill development. Mission Control for researchers will accelerate research opportunities by providing access to real-time student data at different grain sizes. In return, researchers in the Navigated Learning Collaborative will inform the system and product development to ensure best practices in teaching, learning, and science are at the core of the design and product development.

Mission Control for Researchers will be designed as an interface that makes data and information easily accessible and exportable for the members of the Navigator research community. We will maintain the highest levels of data privacy and security. Any access to data will require permissions and automated settings will be set conservatively to ensure the privacy of all users. Through Mission Control for Researchers, no researcher will have access to student level data. The data will be exportable as a CSV file to allow for analysis.

Navigator is being used by over 7M students worldwide across K12, HigherEd, Skills and Professional Learning. There is a pipeline of over 40M additional users that Gooru is looking to onboard (more than half of them in the US). Navigator collects extensive amounts of data across disciplines, cohorts, and geographies from all learner activity streams. This includes

1. User Data

   1. Learner engagement with the learning activity and interactions with peers.

   2. Instructor activity about how they monitor and personalize instruction and

   3. Admin activity about how they track and scale success

2. Disciplines: US K12, Primary Education, Skills Training, Corporate Learning

3. Geographies: US States, India, Silicon Valley Company with engineers in the US, Brazil, China and India

Gooru makes data available to researchers when the researchers work with user cohorts and have their permission to access their data. Gooru will provide researchers with a research portal from where they can access data about

1. Competency Frameworks

2. Learner Activity and Profile

3. Coverage, Use, Engagement and Efficacy of Learning Resources

In this following spreadsheet we are continually adding the data and events we are capturing, including the parameters for each event. On the Sample Reports sheet, are some example reports with real-world data to examine.

Everything stays in public domain

You can review a list of research publications here: https://gooru.org/about/research-publications/

• 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.

• 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