Designing toward a more alive learning future.
Open World Learning Lab is an independent, early-stage research and design initiative exploring how people can take greater ownership of learning throughout life.
Our premise is that learning happens through places, families, communities, work, books, conversation, practice, and meaningful projects. We study how those experiences can become sustained knowledge, skills, better questions, and greater agency.
OWLL pursues educational sovereignty: the practical capacity to shape one's learning and development with meaningful opportunity, sound judgment, and human support. For children, that agency develops alongside adults' responsibilities for care, safety, and exposure to diverse ideas.
The current public work includes place-based learning journey designs, learner-support ideas, system maps, the early LOCUS prototype, and exploratory physical Learning Environments research. Adult and family learning resources are under editorial development, not yet a public program.
Who can learn here?
Self-directed adults, parents and children, educators, mentors, community groups, and researchers all have a place in the long-term vision. Parents are learners, too. Supporting access means creating useful low-cost entry points and adaptable guidance without limiting how far an ambitious learner may progress.
These are intended audiences, not a claim that all corresponding programs, resources, partnerships, or services are already operating.
Learning environments, not just learning content.
A new early-stage research direction considers how rooms, tools, and daily routines could support independent inquiry and learner agency. It remains exploratory, and no room installation service has launched.
Explore Learning Environments →Founded through practice, not abstraction.
Open World Learning Lab was founded by Peter Pielaet-Strayer, an educator and learning designer whose experience spans student mentorship, teaching, program design, hospitality, and place-based learning. He is currently completing an M.S. in Learning Design and Technology while developing OWLL's first learning journeys and the early LOCUS prototype.
His background spans student mentorship and teaching, program and experience design, hospitality, and place-based learning. He is currently completing an M.S. in Learning Design and Technology while developing First Landing, LOCUS, and the broader OWLL research and design program.
Creator Before the Platform
The first version of LOCUS is not software alone.
Before automating the system, OWLL is manually performing the work: studying a place or domain, identifying meaningful questions, building a learning architecture, guiding a learner through the experience, examining the evidence, and revising the journey.
This approach allows the product to emerge from real educational work rather than forcing learning into a predetermined software structure.
Open World Learning Lab is an independent early-stage research and design project. It is not currently operating as a school or accredited educational program.