Learning Library - Adaptation

Indeed, there are many challenges available in the Learning Library and educators and students can find many of them engaging, relevant, and fun to do. However, depending on the particular educational context and learning goals of a classroom or organization, challenges could be tweaked slightly here and there to make them more poignant and pertinent. For example, a science teacher might tweak the Outbreak challenge slightly so that it uses examples of Physics simulations rather than game simulations to talk about virtual experiments. Or, an English teacher might find the Total Recut challenge particularly interesting but would like to use adaptations of Shakespearean literature as examples instead of contemporary film clips.

The Learning Library is built with features to make it easy for users to adapt existing challenges and re-purpose them for their use. In this use case, we learn from Shawna, a teacher at the High School for Global Citizenship's Media Masters after school program, who talks about her experience adapting challenges from the Learning Library for the purpose of her class.


Shawna's adaptation process began with reviewing the NML collection in the Learning Library. With a class objective to teach about global citizenship in mind, Shawna put on her teacher's head as she went through each of the NML challenges to identify what challenges might be relevant for her class and how she might consider using them.

Here's an annotated work note summarizing Shawna's initial reaction to the NML collection.

Adapting a challenge is more than just replacing an element or tweaking a prompt. Educators are encouraged to think about how and to what extent an existing challenge can be modified for use in their setting. For Shawna, she reviewed existing challenges as "base challenges" with an eye toward adaptation and adding the "global twist". Here's Shawna talking about her process of adapting an existing challenge in the NML collection, Negotiating Norms for her class.
Because the new adapted challenge recontextualize the original "base challenge" to better fit the objectives and curriculum of the class, the adapted challenge turned out to be very effective and engaging. It fitted with the rest of the syllabus more smoothly and Shawna was able to easily lead off from the adapted challenge to the next lesson. Here's Shawna reflecting on the outcome of the adapted challenge.

To see the original and the adapted challenges, check out Negotiating Norms and Negotiation Comics in the Learning Library.


On why was it important to adapt existing challenges rather than using what was already in the Learning Library, Shawna from Global Kids, Inc reminded us that it's about sparking students' passion and leveraging their passion to learn about their world and what's important to them.

Choose a challenge from the Learning Library and consider how you might revise it for your own use. You may choose a challenge from the NML collection or from another collection.

As you explore various challenges or if you have located one particular challenge that you would like to adapt (this is your base challenge), collect each of the media elements that you would like to keep.

What would you substitute, modify, or change? Will you need to find additional media elements from the web to replace a media element from your base challenge?

Now that you have re-collected the media elements from the base challenge as well as uploaded new elements for the purpose of adapting the base challenge, you are ready to build one of your own. 

Please share your challenge below? Let us know the name of your challenge, the base challenge, and what was the purpose of the adaptation.