A personalized Learning Navigator for K-12 Education

Vinod Kakumanu
Nov. 5, 2019, 2:29 p.m.

GOORU is considered as a powerful mechanism for navigated learning which is a non-profit personalized learning platform for K-12 students. It is a great tribute to human’s right to education. GOORU consists of real time assessments which is supposed to engage students with an enhanced learning experience. Dr. Prasad Ram also known as Pram is the founder of GOOR who left google and went into its development and finally came into existence in 2011. He has worked in google maps before and thus came up with the idea of creating a learning navigator. It is basically for students to check their progress and get access to different learning pathways to reach their desired destination.

His initial thought was to create a search engine for a good learning but now it has developed as a platform for teachers as well as students to involve in a quality-based learning with researched resources available at finger tips.

The Teachers could facilitate students with various formative assignments and projects and also track student progress

How Learning Navigator Works?

Navigator is really a unique creation of the team and quite interesting too when we look at the working of this technology. It locates every student’s knowledge and skills making them use the personalized learning technology feasibly. There are three main components of navigate learning: Locate, Curate, Facilitate and Mediate

Locate: It exactly pinpoints which all areas of the subject students have understood and where they lag behind

Curate: It provides curated contents to reach desired learning platform. High quality resources are provided by the educators and leading researchers where all the content is available in one place.

Facilitate: helps teachers to monitor the students, including them in live assessments to check their progress and also has activities to let them stay on track.

Mediate: Based on a student’s profile, it gives directions to their learning destination and diverts their journey based on their performance.

Learning Navigator consists of curated courses which is profitable to both teachers as well as students. It can locate each and every student on a ‘map’ which is called Navigator Competency Model (NCM) where teachers can evaluate their cognitive skills. The learner’s profile is not judged based on the grade or marks he has obtained but a holistic understanding of all the concepts and skills.

Educators have perfectly organized the courses and subjects which contains fifteen thousand resource materials and five thousand assessments which cover all the concepts of K-12 Maths, English, Arts and Social Sciences. Teachers can take questions from these or else they can create on their own lessons from the scratch. It is also working with curriculum experts to develop wide range of subjects in K-12 higher education, skill development and corporate learning. Each navigator course is designed for all grade levels. For instance, navigator for Maths contains all concepts from grade 2 to 12 which is set as per Common Core Maths Standards and it covers all mathematical exercise and practices. If a child from 6th grade lacks basic understanding of certain concepts, he can clear the concept with the help of the navigator and then create an individualized learning pathway to get access to advanced learning materials.

The navigator is tagged with various activities and lessons so that it gets an idea what a student need at a given moment. If a student makes a mistake or is confused with a topic, the navigator provides necessary resources and materials for a better understanding.

Students are also allowed to skip content if they have mastered a particular concept or pause to complete additional activity according to their need. The courses are created considering the flexibility of student’s needs and therefore it is made available on computer, tablet or mobile phone. In this way, they can learn wherever they are or at any time.

The navigator constantly measures teachers and student’s engagement with the digital resources available and surely updates learners’ profile according to their progress in the activity. Teachers have the option to choose the feature “live assessments” to monitor student’s understanding level.

GOORU is a competency-based learning that accumulates all types of learners which enroute towards a modern pedagogical pathway for both scholar and student.