Gooru Navigator Getting started guide for Content Providers

Table of Contents

Overview

This guide will help you get started adding or creating content for Gooru Navigator and the various Navigator tools. It will describe how to sign up and get various use cases done.

Value proposition

• Bring your premium content into Navigator
• Get access to a large catalog of curated OER resources
• Offer your users both premium and curated OER content
• Reach millions of users across disciplines
• Reach both individual users and institutions

How to sign up

Signing up as a content developer will provide you an account to access the Gooru Navigator Library, and will allow us to identify what it is you want to achieve and provide you additional support in that.

1. Sign up using the Content Providers sign up page.
2. You will then be contacted by the Gooru Team within 48 hours, with the next steps and guided support to resources.

How to Get Started

At a high level the process most content developers follow when starting is to develop their learning map, and it follows three key steps,

1. Creating the competency framework (the map),
2. Creating new, or linking existing content to those competencies we mapped out is step 1, and
3. Linking competencies together into learning paths to create courses.

Optional additional information:

1. Competency Framework – Navigator Competency Model
   1. Progression Space: Develop competency frameworks for various disciplines as part of Gooru Universal Taxonomy (GUT). Work with partners who are domain experts. Competency Framework definition includes the 
      1. Establishing the progression space of Facet-Domain-Topic-Competency for any facet of interest
      2. Defining Micro-competencies, Dependencies, and Precedent edges
      3. Descriptive Metadata, Mis-concepts, Decay Functions for each competency
   2. Crosswalks: Develop crosswalks of local standards to GUT
      1. Map competencies in a facet to CASE standards for US K12
      2. Map competencies in a facet to corporate norms
   3. Markers: In practice, there are common destinations that institutions want their cohorts to master. The common destinations, like grades in K12, beginner/intermediate/advanced levels in skills training and corporate learning, or job-role specific destinations such as program manager/project manager/product manager. These destinations correspond to a set of competencies for a particular facet for which the learners should demonstrate mastery. Markers are labels assigned to a group of competencies.
   4. Milestones: Milestone is also a set of competencies. But, milestones are totally ordered. For a given milestone, every other milestone is either before it (subset) or after it (superset). For every competency framework, we specify the milestones. These are often used in current practices of how instruction in the facet is facilitated.
2. Learning Activities Catalog 
   1. Open Education Resources and Tools for the competency such as resources, questions, collections, assessments, projects, interactive, etc. are established and mapped to the competency in a catalog. Navigator OER Catalog – Coverage and Quality details the current catalog in the Navigator.
   2. Signature Content in terms of signature collections and signature assessments need to be defined. Guide to SigAssessments 2020 details the approach.
      1. Collections can include content and tools
      2. Navigated Learning Assessments has to be fully defined
         1. Competency has Proficiency (4-types), Performance, Portfolio, DoK, Confidence Level, Alt-Concepts and Decay function that capture a students understanding of the competency
         2. Use a simplified visualization, but, when one inspects a competency, the details are displayed
         3. An assessment has primary competency and secondary competencies – mastery on primary and portfolio on all secondary competencies. This is often the case with FRQs
         4. Questions have different number of points
         5. Teacher can be suggested questions for an assessment based on the competencies she wants to cover as well as her class’ skylines
         6. Do we compute measures like “discrimination” – that is if most students with highly get this question right (in colloquial parlance “easy question”), then it is not discriminating 
   3. Competency-aligned lessons are important to enable personalized learning pathways
      1. Develop lessons tagged to competencies that comprise of collections of learning activities, assessments that include questions, and offline tasks
   4. Diagnostic Assessment: Provider of the competency framework should also establish a diagnostic assessment which can be used to compute a skyline for the learner
   5. Learning Registry
      1. Descriptive Metadata about Providers 
      2. Links to Catalog: 
      3. Interoperability Compliance: 
3. Courses are a label assigned to a set of competencies that have lessons aligned to the competencies. Courses relate to local norms.
   1. Scope and Sequence of the curriculum that the school or teacher uses to teach the facet should be defined for the framework
   2. Lesson Plans for every competency should be defined and should also consider defining it for the popular curriculums that are likely be used
   3. Course Maps: Migrate pre-existing classic courses to the Learning Map and begin to tag lessons to competencies

How To Develop New Competency Frameworks

Overview:

The goal of this process is to deconstruct your learning space into bite-sized concepts and to then link those concepts together and group them in a hierarchy of groups, like subjects > Course > Domains > Topics… so that we can map them and provide your learners a GPS-like navigation of your learning space. The way you will deconstruct things will look a little different for each use-case, but it’s all the same structure underneath. In the template you will use to deconstruct your learning space we will provide you some examples of different spaces we have mapped which you can review, like one for Math, Science, professional development etc.

Mapping out a learning space is similar to how we have mapped out Earth, so I’ll refer to that to provide further context. We can loosely group spaces on earth into a hierarchy like: Continents > Countries > States > Cities > Addresses. A learning space is similar:

1. Continents could be the equivalent of the Major Subjects
2. Countries could be the equivalent of courses within the subject
3. States could be the equivalent of domains within the course
4. Cities could be the equivalent of Topics within the domains
5. and Addresses could be the equivalent of Competencies or concepts that you will learn. These are the building blocks of the map.
   1. In some cases we have even gone as far as defining Rooms within an address, which are the equivalent of Micro-competencies within a competency, or different approaches to understanding and using that competency: E.G Guitar finger placement could be the concept being taught, and within that, you could teach finger placement for right or left-handed people, They are slightly different, but a learner probably does not need to know both methods. They are grouped within the same competency, but have different “flavors”.

You get out what you put in:

Imagine Google maps only listed Countries, some major cities, and the highways that connect them. It would not be very useful. The same applies here. For a map of your learning space to have value, it needs to be as granular as you can make it. Therefore to set the expectation, this process will take time and effort, but each level of granularity will not just provide a marginal improvement, it will increase the value of your map by orders of magnitude.

Define competency frameworks

• Develop new competency framework
  1. Download the competency framework definition template. You only have view access, so make your own copy of it by clicking on File > Make a copy
     1. Before you begin, note that the number and names of these groups will be up to you, there are some learning spaces that can be mapped within a few levels of hierarchy, while others need several layers. The important point to get to however is the address level. Feel free to call the levels that makes sense to you.
     2. Define the global group of your learning space. You can think of this as designating the continent or continents on your map. Fill these in the “Subject” column in the template spreadsheet.
     3. The next step is to define the courses within that subject. You can think of this as designating the countries within your continent. Fill these in the “Course” column in the template spreadsheet. Make sure to start building the hierarchy, I.E if you have multiple courses in a Subject, make sure to also fill in the Subject column for each of those courses.
     4. The next step is to define the domains within your courses. You can think of this as designating the states within your country. Fill these in the “Domains” column in the template spreadsheet. Make sure to further build out the hierarchy so that each column to the left of where you are at has information within it.
     5. The next step is to define the topics within your domains. You can think of this as designating the Cities within your country. Fill these in the “Topics” column in the template spreadsheet. Make sure to further build out the hierarchy so that each column to the left of where you are at has information within it.
     6. The next step is to define the competencies/concepts within your topics. You can think of this as designating the addresses within your city. Fill these in the “Competency” column in the template spreadsheet. Make sure to further build out the hierarchy so that each column to the left of where you are at has information within it.
     7. The next step is to define the Micro-competencies within your competency. You can think of these as the rooms within your address. Fill these in the “Micro-Competency” column in the template spreadsheet. Now, many maps don’t go down this far, but if you have this level of granularity, definitely put it in. If you don’t yet have this level of granularity, we would highly recommend you consider developing it.
  2. List out the dependencies of each row in the spreadsheet in the “dependency” column. This defines if there are any pre-requisites between rows. I.E If Row 23, require that you should already know row 14, 15 and 18, then list the names of those
  3. Define competency model and email it to learning-maps@gooru.org with subject as New Competency Framework. (Ability to upload to Gooru Navigator Library coming shortly)
  4. Gooru will review the sheet, ingest it if everything is in order and inform so that you can see the competency model in Gooru Navigator Library
• Crosswalk to an existing competency framework
  1. Email learning-maps@gooru.org with category and subject for which you want to define a crosswalk. Gooru will send you the template
  2. Define the crosswalk and email it to learning-maps@gooru.org with subject as Competency Crosswalk Definition
  3. Gooru will review the sheet, ingest it if everything is in order and inform so that you can see the new crosswalk framework in Gooru Navigator Library
• Define diagnostic
  1. Create diagnostic assessments as regular assessments in your My Content area for the newly created framework or crosswalk
  2. Email learning-maps@gooru.org with subject as New Diagnostic Assessments and include your email id, tenant name and for each diagnostic assessment, the link to the assessments, the grade (or level) for which the diagnostic is defined
  3. Gooru will update these assessments as diagnostic assessments for the framework and grade (level)
• Create Signature content
  1. Build signature collections and assessments for every competency
• Publish competency framework
  1. Submit for review
  2. Publish on approval
• Develop Navigator Lessons
  1. Build collections and assessments for every competency from OER content or your own content
  2. Build a lesson for each competency with collections and/or assessments
  3. Create lessons plans for each lesson as needed
• Develop Navigator Catalog
  1. Build different learning activities for each competency such as solved examples, practice problems, challenging questions, offline activities, content in different languages etc.
• Create Navigator courses
  1. Develop courses for different markers by pulling together Navigator lessons into different units for the competencies in the marker

Organize and Manage libraries

• Organize content into libraries as required

How to create your own course and content

To help you in creating courses and content please review the below video guide and/or the guide document: Content Creation Guide (Fall 2021)

Best Practices – Content Creation

View Guide here: Best Practices – Content Creation

How to import or add content

Import bulk content

• Option 1
  1. Download the content ingestion template
  2. Fill out the template with content urls and associated metadata
  3. For now, email this template back to us to upload partner@gooru.org. Soon, you will be able to upload directly to Navigator Library using Bulk upload.
• Option 2
  1. Provide a list of domains to crawl
  2. For now, email this list to us directly partner@gooru.org. Soon, you will be able to trigger a crawl directly through Navigator Library and the System will notify once the crawling and indexing is complete
  3. Review, update with metadata indexed content, and publish

Add

1. Create new content using Gooru Navigator Library.
2. Create collections, assessments from imported content and/or OER content in the Gooru catalog. See the following guides for additional help: Creating a Collection, Creating an Assessment, Creating a Course from Scratch.

What OER content do we already have mapped out

For detailed information on what content we already have mapped out and available for use to build out Navigator courses, review this comprehensive document: Navigator OER Catalog Overview – Coverage and Quality | Apr 2020

How to access content metrics

1. Get access to detailed metrics in Gooru Navigator Library
2. Get usage metrics by geography, content type, facet, grade/level

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FAQ