About Us
CrowdED Learning is an initiative of World Education, a division of JSI, whose mission is to advance equity and improve people’s lives around the world through education and economic development. Through applied service-learning, research, and experimental resource development, we are identifying scalable approaches to streamlining equitable access to quality OER. Our work in local, state, national, and international contexts helps build capacity to overcome challenges in the design, organization, and effective use of OER.
Our History
CrowdED Learning was founded in 2017 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in Chicago, IL, with a focus on expanding awareness of and access to open education resources for adult education. In 2020, amidst the massive shifts in education brought about by the COVID pandemic, it became part of World Education.
As World Education’s OER initiative, CrowdED Learning’s work has expanded beyond US adult education. Through an initial pilot in St. Lucia, we are working to support capacity-building to expand equitable access to learning through local, state, national, and international OER initiatives.
Our Approach
We continually ideate, implement, test, and refine our approaches to four key elements that support replicable, scalable models for OER.
Define Skills
We develop frameworks to define key skills and concepts for which content should be generated.
Train Teachers
We provide training to help educators build strategies for integrating & designing reusable OER.
Address OER Gaps
We engage educators in service learning to generate OER that meet localized needs.
Facilitate OER Use
We build tools like SkillBlox to ease the process of finding, remixing, and sharing OER.
Our Funders
Through generous funding from the following organizations, we continue to expand equitable access to quality, open education through service learning, experimentation, research, and product development.
Mariam Assefa Fund
2020-22
Through World Education Service’s Mariam Assefa Fund, we codified the core processes (the EdTech Maker Space) and tools (SkillBlox) that make up the CrowdED Learning open content ecosystem.
Institute for Education Sciences
2021-25
Through design-based research, a usability/feasibility study, and a Randomized Control Trial, the Teaching Skills that Matter-SkillBlox Instructional Support Pilot is helping to identify ways SkillBlox can be improved to ease the process of finding, evaluating, and sharing quality, relevant OER.
OCTAE
2021-24
As part of the Digital Resilience in the American Workforce (DRAW) initiative, two EdTech Maker Spaces were run in which educators learned how to develop participants’ digital skills while they helped build a Digital Skills Library and a Digital Skills Glossary.
USAID
2021-23
To help build the capacity of St. Lucian educators in addressing localized resource needs through OER resource development, CrowdED Learning designed a facilitated an EdTech Maker Space design course to be added as part of Sir Arthur Lewis Community College’s eLearning Academy.
Florida Literacy Coalition
2021, 2022, 2023
To support Florida educators and beyond in helping adult learners build critical life skills, FLC has funded two EdTech Maker Space projects that have resulted in expansive libraries of content in Health Literacy and Financial Literacy.
Maryland TESOL
2021
For their annual spring professional development event, Maryland TESOL hosted an EdTech Maker Space to address resource gaps for low-level English learners and teachers’ need for edtech tool training.
Color Vowel
2021
Partners at Color Vowel provided EdTech Maker Space participants free training and certification so that they could adapt and reuse digital Color Vowel Chart activities.
Creative Commons
2020
As a member of the Creative Commons Global Network, CrowdED Learning was awarded a Communities Activity Fund grant, which was used to fund the initial pilot of the EdTech Maker Space. This resulted in a leveled reading library of over 1,000 digital resources.
Our Content Partners
These content partners have supported CrowdED Learning through endorsing the adaptation of their content as part of previous EdTech Maker Space projects, or conducting alignment of their content to be included within the SkillBlox platform.
Southwest Minnesota Adult Basic Education
Their popular Reading Skills for Today's Adults leveled reading program was the source of the very first EdTech Maker Space. Through this partnership, they applied Creative Commons licensing to RSTA, and participants developed over 1,000 supplemental digital activities to support early level adult readers.
Literacy Minnesota granted permission to apply Creative Commons licensing to their popular ESL Story Bank, which provides language practice for pre-beginning and beginning level English learners. Participants in an EdTech Maker Space then developed Jamboard activities to provide additional interactive language practice opportunities for each story.
Florida Literacy Coalition's popular Staying Healthy curriculum was used as part of a 2021 EdTech Maker Space in which teachers created and curated over 200 supplemental activities to augment this free, ESOL health literacy program.
CrowdED Learning partnered with Women Employed to develop a new, open and adaptable digital version of their popular Career Foundations curriculum. Part of this work was repurposed to help create the EdTech Integration Strategy Toolkit.
McGraw-Hill has provided standards alignments for nearly 150 titles, all of which are referenced within the SkillBlox platform.
New Readers Press has provided standards alignments for over 50 titles, all of which are referenced within the SkillBlox platform.
Aztec Paxen Publishing has provided standards alignments for nearly 50 titles, all of which are referenced within the SkillBlox platform.