Overview
Chicago Early Learning is the City of Chicago’s Early Learning Portal, where residents can easily find and compare early learning programs side-by-side. Here’s a look at some of the current site features:
- Custom search tool with pre-populated location names, browse by neighborhood, and custom filter to find the best choice for you and your family
- Side-by-side comparisons of locations that are easy to print, share, and save
- Text feature allows you to search for locations by zip code from any cell phone
- Entire site, including data elements and navigation, available in English and Spanish
- All code and data driving the site is completely open source, including a full API of the data that drives the site, updated nightly.
As part of our commitment to developing tools that meet the needs of residents and to include them in the creation process, we conducted extensive formal and informal user testing on this site after it was first launched in 2012.
Here’s a pretty thorough take on our user testing, redesign, and traffic & usage stats from October 2013:
Current work
We’re currently in the middle of Phase Three of this project, where the major objective is to expand the existing site to serve as an entry point for citywide early childhood education enrollment. In short, to turn the existing system from a sortable, web-based listing of locations to a robust jumping-off point for parents and caregivers seeking to enroll children. Here’s a blog post outlining that work and here’s the Github repository. We are very active there— you can follow along with the work in great detail.
Partners
This project is funded by a grant from the J.B. & M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation administered by the Chicago Community Trust through the One Chicago Fund. There are a number of key partners in completing this work:
- Chicago Mayor’s Office provides strategic direction and coordination of resources from Chicago Public Schools and Department of Family and Support Services
- Gabrielle Lyon is the project lead
- Scott Robbin the technical lead
- Smart Chicago runs the project, with Daniel X. O’Neil overseeing the project
Here’s a look at all of the contributors to the project on Github. The watchers page is illustrative as well:
Chicago Early Learning Github Watchers Page
Media
Contact the Chicago Mayor’s Office with press inquiries.
Press
Mayor Emanuel Unveils Online Early Learning Portal to Help Parents and Families Find Quality Programs for Children in Their Neighborhoods: Mayor’s Office press release on the initial launch. Snip:
“We were happy to collaborate with the City on this interactive map, which will allow parents and families to find information about these programs easily and quickly. We’re interested in hearing from parents and caregivers on what would make the site more useful to them,” said Dan O’Neil, Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative. “We’re also releasing the code for the site as open source, so that it can be used to make similar map-based sites showing resources across the city.”
City Offers Early Learning Info Online: covering the tool.
Review of Chicago Early Learning Portal on CBS with Kevin Hauswirth from Daniel X. O’Neil on Vimeo.
The Launch of Chicago Early Learning: Our own blog post on the initial launch.
The Chicago Early Learning Portal: A One-Stop Shop to Find Important Data About Chicago’s Early Childhood Programs: blog post by Azavea covering the initial launch. Snip:
One of the the most exciting aspects of this project is that all of the code for the implementation is being released as open source under the MIT License and is available on GitHub. This means that other organizations can leverage the investment the Smart Chicago Collaborative has made in this project to implement early learning portals for their own communities.
Here’s all of the blog posts we’ve published about this project: