LearnResearch

Information about more specialized clinical and translational educational resources is often spread across multiple information channels at multiple institutions, making it hard for researchers to understand what courses are available.

Our team has attempted to solve this problem in the past by building an application devoted to storing information about courses and also an application focused on making videos of courses available for viewing. Our colleagues in the Harvard Catalyst Postgraduate Education program asked us to find a way to bring the data of these two applications together.

Education delivery platforms in the marketplace have exploded in popularity and usage, but many of these platforms assume a user already knows what kind of courses or videos for which they may be searching. This assumption can actually mean that some courses remain undiscovered.

LearnResearch is an application that uses the eagle-i semantic web technology and the N-Lighten educational resources ontology to provide users a way to search for and find both in-person and online courses.

By modeling these resources using the N-Lighten ontology, users are able to see categories of course offerings and course videos and find resources in categories they had not previously considered exploring.