HippoCampus

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Content Providers Old and New Partner to Make Searching Easier

June 7, 2011 | 2:37 PM | By

Flickr:A Trying Youth

Google “photosynthesis” and you’ll see a long list of links to everything from Wikipedia to PBS to the University of Illinois, with plenty of YouTube videos thrown into the mix.

To streamline this somewhat random page of results for both educators and learners, a group of education content providers is teaming up to create a better defined framework for education-related searches online.

In a move that brings together for the first time traditional content companies and free, open content sites, the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons (CC) are partnering to improve search results online the through the creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources. That means teachers looking for content — much of it aligned to Common Core standards — will be able to more easily find information they need. At least that’s the hope.

“This can do for students what John Dewey did for readers 150 years ago when he created standardized card cataloging.”

“Easy access to high-quality learning resources is the end goal of this project,” said Charlene Gaynor, CEO of Association of Education Publishers at the Context in Content conference today.

Many of the big-hitters on both sides of the spectrum are involved, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), Curriki, McGraw-Hill Education, Monterey Institute for Technology in Education (MITE), Pearson, Promethean, Scholastic Inc., and SMART Technologies, BetterLesson.

“Educators and students miss out on education resources available online because it is takes too long or is too hard to find appropriate content,” said Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons in a press release. “A common metadata schema will make this search more efficient and effective so educators can quickly discover the educational resources they want, including those they can reuse under Creative Commons licenses.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Association of Educational Publishers, creative commons, Curriki, HippoCampus, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISKME, McGraw-Hill, OER, Pearson

HippoCampus: Online Content In and Out of Class

February 1, 2011 | 10:04 AM | By

HippoCampus

Teaching the Civil War

Through a series of slideshow presentations, HippoCampus covers a wide range of subject areas, from the Civil War to biopsychology.
By Sara Bernard

For students seeking study guides and educators needing specific content, here’s another robust online resource: HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), provides multimedia homework and study help to high school and community college students and instructors free of charge.

As part of MITE’s National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), HippoCampus content focuses on general education topics like algebra and biology and is largely donated by universities and other educational institutions.

It was a surprise to us … but probably more than 80 percent of HippoCampus use is happening in classrooms.

“Teachers work hard; they don’t have a lot of time,” says Gary Lopez, executive director and co-founder of both the Monterey Institute and HippoCampus. “If you put in a search online for the Boston Tea Party, ninety percent of the stuff that turns up is irrelevant. The purpose of HippoCampus is that we do the work for you. We make sure that it’s relevant to your needs and your curriculum, that it’s vetted so you don’t have to go through all the craziness [on the Web] to find the right stuff.”

I spoke to Lopez about the site, who uses it, and HippoCampus’ next steps.

Q. How did HippoCampus start?

A. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement started in about 2001. There are a number of projects out there, such as MIT OpenCourseWare Project, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale. Then we came along about four years ago. We wanted to build an OER site for high school and community college students, a repository for general education curriculum — algebra, U.S. history, biology, that sort of thing. Most other OER sites out there were for research universities. HippoCampus is a way to get material out to students and teachers who need it. Any student in the country can find course content here that supports a lot of the courses they take.

Q. Who uses HippoCampus?

A. It’s used by students, but even more by high school and community college instructors who use the content in their classrooms, sometimes by itself, sometimes alongside a textbook. If you have a textbook, you can search specific pages and up comes HippoCampus content that’s relevant to that page’s assignment. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, HippoCampus, MITE, Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, National Repository of Online Courses, NROC, online learning, open education resources