Department makes Learning Registry code base available and invites public to innovate; Federal support to end in early fall

The U.S. Department of Education invites the public to innovate and build on the Learning Registry project when support ends on September 24, 2018, and will make the project’s code base, documentation and archived metadata available.

What is the Learning Registry?

The Learning Registry was launched in November 2011 by the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense with the goal of improving the quality and availability of federal learning resources. As a decentralized repository, or index, of metadata about learning resources, the Learning Registry was designed to act as a backend solution, or an underlying infrastructure, for sharing resources. When it was designed, the intent was for other organizations to connect their frontend services, or user-friendly sites like the Illinois Shared Learning Environment (ISLE OER), to the Learning Registry to share learning resources more broadly across platforms where teachers already go to search for and share content.

Paving the way for opportunity and innovation

From our ongoing work with #GoOpen states and districts, we know that making it easier to find, access, and share learning resources across platforms is a priority. Tools, like the Learning Registry, that facilitate interoperability and sharing between platforms and systems are still needed; however, because the Learning Registry relies on rapidly aging technologies that are incompatible with many other systems, this iteration of the tool is no longer the right fit for the job.

We hope that by making the project’s code base, documentation and archived metadata readily available to the public via GitHub and the Internet Archive, developers, institutions, and members of the general public will innovate and build on the Department’s initial investment by creating new tools, technologies, or improved versions of the Learning Registry once Department support for the project ends on September 24, 2018.

Here is what it means for you:

• You can access the project’s code base, documentation, and archived database of metadata by visiting the Learning Registry GitHub Page. Start with the Learning Registry Repository, which contains all of the code necessary to run a node. The Learning Registry Repository Wiki includes all of the project documentation, like the Community Projects page that provides documentation for the Easy Publish tool, the Search Widget, and other utilities built by the community for the Learning Registry. We will continue making updates to the documentation over the next month.
• For stakeholders currently using the Learning Registry, we will provide technical assistance within the transition period over the next month (through September 24, 2018). Please contact our Learning Registry Developers Group for support.
• If you are not currently using the Learning Registry, but have technical questions about how you can leverage the Learning Registry code base, please reach out to Learning Registry Developers Group.
• We will close new metadata record submissions on September 1, 2018 in order to create a complete archive of the metadata. To receive additional updates as we begin the decommission process, please join the Learning Registry Group.

The sharing of openly licensed educational resources continues to be a priority of the Department, and we can’t wait to see what new innovations will grow from this initial investment.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at tech@ed.gov.