Perhaps nobody told you, but over 1.35 million objects from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the national zoo have been recently released and combined with custom tools to support rich, digital learning around the globe using the largest treasure trove of historical assets in the world.
Somewhere between 9 and 10am EST on a chilly Thursday morning late in October, a year of work culminated with the activation of a new domain. You might not have felt it, but the Smithsonian quietly released the single largest worldwide collection of OER by any one agency in the history of digital resource publishing. And the fun’s just begun.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. After a year of planning and design headed up by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) with technical design and development led by Navigation North Learning, the Smithsonian Learning Lab was launched.
Three weeks beyond a very hushed “soft-launch”, SCLDA already finds itself managing nearly a 1,000 sessions a day and has over 600 registered users. Amazingly, over 700 private Learning Collections have been created, with over 100 of them now published by teams of Smithsonian educators and various classroom teachers from across the country. With the big, official “PR” launch still months away, many already seem to be finding their way to this new environment. Teachers do talk after all. And it’s no wonder; we worked with SCLDA for two years conducting research with hundreds of top educators and classrooms across the country to design a system where otherwise passive purveyors would now have the freedom to peruse and select their own artifacts and create custom collections focused on specific topics, or designed to teach a certain concept, or explore a given genre, or examine a selected historical era.
Where there was nothing a month ago, there are now fully digitized, engaging, learning experiences as assembled by local teachers, top researchers, and historian/educators alike using artifacts from the Smithsonian’s treasure trove of historical holdings and assets. We are very proud of the contributions we were able to make to the new Smithsonian Learning Lab and look forward to seeing people assemble their own collections, make usable copies of others’, browse through the world’s largest digital repository of materials, or focus on topics as diverse as:
With over a million useful resources available right now, and an aggressive digitization strategy in place targeting another 130 million more records (that is correct, 130 million), the Smithsonian is doing its part. And we’ve done ours as well. When a system blends vast resources with teachers’ immense creativity, learners need just bring their curiosity and a desire for the world’s most comprehensive, richest resources.
Welcome to your Smithsonian Learning Lab.
Sincerely, Navigation North
& Jodi Halligan 
disaggregating, defining, and typically ranking or relationally justifying those pieces.
amounts of their time teaching and reflecting on how to mix up the best learning concoctions through repeated trial and error as an average educator does hundreds of times a week. So people, teams, agencies, and companies unwittingly focus on tackling more tangible items like helping teachers find resources, save them, drop them into a display view,and solicit some direct student reflection about the items or respond to a simple-structure question. And yes, powerful learning can be aided by a well-developed and timely resource, but rarely do resources independently instigate and support a sustained learning experience that moves the learner through a series of inter-related cognitive cycles requisite to deep learning and connection with the content.
WYSIWYG editor tool bar and are not rendered as a playlist of slides. 
So whether the curricular item is referred to as a web-based project, an online lesson plan, or a digital learning resource, our imagination makes anticipatory leaps envisioning the promised innovation. However, I am always burdened by my own history in this space. In 1995 I started teaching. Because of some of my “home-grown” online curriculum at the time, I was invited to be part of a statewide project in California that brought 100 teachers together to learn FrontPage and Composer to make online versions of our best units to publish on the World Wide Web. Sharing ideas and coming up with imaginative projects and activities with other teachers was awesome, but taking those ideas and making them then conform to the old Bernie Dodge 
However, more times than not, I am directed to a list of PDF’s or videos. Instead of being mesmerized and drawn in by rich resources, thoughtfully organized by skilled educators, I find myself looking at none of those items listed out above, let alone a combination of many of them. And the real tragedy is in the amount of time and effort that goes into bringing together teachers, having them consider and articulate their practice and instructional approaches full of dynamic and fluid ideas and strategies, we end up modeling up very traditional, unimaginative, one dimensional frameworks. Rather than work to innovative the use of the very digital environment in which these derivative, digital learning objects are stored, the resulting content is most often published in simple digital document formats or single-perspective, lecture-based videos. The platforms themselves are often elaborate, the communication tools are robust, the group utilities are feature-rich, the overall design is thoughtful and responsive, but when you get to the OER objects, we end up browsing through tired collections of PDFs, embedded Crocodoc files, passive html pages, or simple play-lists of materials where teachers might have not even developed much of the material, but instead were merely asked to assess it’s instructional value, subject-focus, and standards alignment. The curriculum or key learning assets make little to no use of the rich, digital, database supported environments in which they are hosted. So while it seems that programs often afford their web site and auxiliary functions and marketing content far more UI and UX considerations, the actual instructional artifacts the program is designed to solicit, build, develop and deploy get stuck with antiquated design models. After all the work that goes into these types of programs, and we know the work well, this should be the easiest part to get right…right?
increased ability to use, navigate, research, and demonstrate learning gains. We believe some of this is attributable to implementing tools that better provide a given teacher a clear method to replicate and communicate their instructional decisions and scaffolding in a unified way along with the sequenced learning objects/resources they’ve selected. In and of themselves, playlists of objects, videos, and quizzes aren’t structured to perform in this way and don’t provide enough spacing for subtle, but key cognitive reflection points nor room for learner differentiation based on those “formative forks” that occur when a good teacher is guiding students. More testing is occurring now, and the data is supporting our inclinations. We are excited to be moving the conversation and the focus of back to the learning process itself, and ultimately welcome more projects, programs, agencies, and firms to do the same. We are not trying to abandon paying homage to traditional curricular formatting which is designed to document and record static instructional models. We are merely more interested in creating new models that are designed to capture and publish fluid, organic, strong learning exchanges crafted by practitioners each and every day in classrooms across the nation. Platforms that are making resulting student data more readily accessible and usable for teachers, that are presenting diverse ways for colleagues to coordinate and communicate, and are enabling up-stream agencies to track and monitor assessment data across large systems for strategic long-term decision making are all good things, but only when they are also paying attention to the heart of the matter.
Let’s start with the funkiest one that I have grown to really like, Plickers. Here’s how it goes: You go to Plickers and create your free teacher account and set up your class of students. You print off a card for each of your students that they can hold up in response to questions that you pose to them. Like maybe you ask, “Why did England increase the number of British troops sent to the American colonies following the French and Indian War?”
Kind of like the Plickers app but all the students will need a device of some kind to get online and participate. They can use their school supplied tablets or computers or their own smart phones for that matter.
This system is a bit more robust than Kahoot. Again, you create your free teacher account and set up your student list in the system. You can then direct students to quizzes you created or adopted from other teacher-users. Unlike Kahoot, you can elect to have the questions in your quizzes time-based or just let the students conduct at their own pace. Another fun feature is the space race mode in which it shows real-time, visual results of students answering questions correctly.
