Three weeks ago, we launched Ellis College, and with it released our new community learning platform and a first set of undergraduate courses in business targeted to the working adult population. Now, I may be just a bit biased, but I do believe that for supporting socio-constructivist learning, the “Ellis Community Learning Platform” is the most robust technology environment on the market today. I realize this is a bold claim. To support it, we plan to devote significant time in the coming months documenting, justifying, and empirically testing our assertions.

In the meantime, I’ve posted here an initial draft of pseudo-white paper cum marketing communication on the platform.

(UNext draft copy)

The Ellis Community Learning Platform

Introduction: Engaging, effective, and unforgettable learning
Think about a time in your life when you felt passionately engaged in learning something. Perhaps it was in college when, along with two or three of your classmates, you spent long nights debating ideas in the coffee shop, researching materials in the library, reviewing ongoing drafts of your project in the dormitory, then defending your work with your professor during her office hours. Perhaps it was a time at your workplace, when your supervisor challenged you to develop a proposal for a new product line, and then mentored you through the grueling process to produce the plan you eventually presented to company stakeholders. Or perhaps it was when you were a teenager, practicing hours with your basketball coach and teammates to hone a new defense you used in the season’s final tournament.

Life-changing episodes such as these – what are often called “deep learning” experiences – share a number of attributes that, acting together, make a learning experience engaging, effective, and unforgettable:

• You are motivated and personally invested
• You actively participate and contribute
• You meaningfully interact with others, including peers and mentors

A unique learning platform to support a unique learning experience
This view of deep learning – and the impact it can make in peoples’ lives – is what inspired the creation of the Ellis Community Learning Platform. The environment was built in response to the woeful state of existing “courseware” that take the worst features of bricks-and-mortar education and translates them to the online space. Thus, the Ellis Community Learning Platform was designed not as a better online lecture and exam platform, but rather (as shown in Table-1), to support a very distinct view of learning, namely:

• Students learn when actively constructing their own internal understanding, grasping and applying concepts, and engaging with material.
• Learning is a socially mediated process.

Table-1. Major differentiators between existing online learning platforms and the Ellis Community Learning Platform
Attribute/Feature	"Files & Folders" Learning Platforms	Ellis Community Learning Platform
Overarching Learning Design	Instructivist1 (knowledge-delivery, teaching-based)	Socio-constructivist2 (learn-by-doing, community-based)
Role of instructor	Centralized gatekeeper	Community-based mentor
Underlying Conceptual Model	Courses organized by technology-centered components: Documents Drop-box Bulletin board Chat room	Courses contextually organized by student-centered learning experience: Problem, project, or scenario Tasks Learning Resources
Relationship between content and community	Separate/distinct	Integrated/embedded
Role of online content	Collection of linearly sequenced information to disseminate to students	Collection of scaffolded resources to support interactive exploration, questioning, debate, and reflection by learners
Role of online communication	Provide means for students to converse with each other	Provide reasons for learners to collaborate with each other
Social presence1	Absent/Low	High
Notes: Instructivism is a prescriptive-based framework that views knowledge as something that is external to the individual, and thus can be attained by passively transferring information from a knowledgeable "authority" figure (teacher) to the student. Socio-constructivism is a phenomenological-based framework that views knowledge as something that is socially mediated and actively constructed by the individual in the context of one’s experiences.  Social presence refers to the degree that people, and the consequent relationships between people, are perceived as "real" in an online environment.

The Ellis Community Learning Platform uses authentic problems that enable students to “learn by doing.” Students are given a realistic scenario and problem to solve based on the content domain. They work through tasks, supported by the necessary information to complete the learning objectives for the course. Instead of a final test at the end of the course, students are evaluated on their “solution” for the given problem and short quizzes on the course content.

Social interactions among students and instructors play key roles. Instructors guide and mentor students, pointing out to them specific resources and activities as they are needed. Students may interact one-on-one with the instructor, with the class as a whole, or a within small group as they engage in course-related activities. Students learn from drawing their own conclusions, interacting with the instructor, listening to the replies from classmates, and responding to classmates.

This pedagogy is embedded in the Ellis Community Learning Platform. The course interface demands that students engage in active constructivist approaches to learning. The delivery environment requires them to work through course content collaboratively with other students. Within a single, integrated screen, a full suite of learning, communication, and collaboration tools are available to students, including:

• A contextualized course map that embeds a scaffolded learning experience within a problem-centered, collaborative-based learning design. Course pages are scoped to the class (all students), team (members of a temporal work group), and individual (student and instructor only). These pages embed personalized content and secure discussion spaces tied directly to the page content and scope;
• Community centers that provide access to and control of all asynchronous discussion, roster, and synchronous communication activities spread across the course map. These centers organize the social and collaborative activities in the class by their scope: class-wide, team-based, and individual;
• Online awareness indicators that display when other students (classmates and teammates) are online and “in the course.” Awareness status is directly linked to class and team rosters that present additional student profile and community-activity information. Together, these features encourage and facilitate students to organize into formal and informal social networks that enable learning, foster community, and increase retention; and
• Embedded assessment objects that feed directly into an integrated, embedded gradebook that filters and reports on all assessment-based elements spread across the course map.

Learning experiences that transcend the course
Students entering a degree program make a promise to themselves about their own future. Ellis College has designed its services – academic, financial, technical, placement, advising, and the like – to help each student live up to that promise. Just as the Ellis Community Learning Platform supports a fundamentally unique approach to learning, it likewise supports a unique approach to what it means to be a member of broader, virtual learning community.

For example, the Ellis Community Learning Platform provides the student with a campus home base or virtual office that enhances the student’s sense of community and fosters her affinity with Ellis College. MyEllis – the student’s “start page” within the college – assembles all the academic and administrative resources in one place, personalized to the individual student. The tools and services within MyEllis include:

• MyCourses, which reports on all current activities taking place within currently enrolled courses, including recent discussion activity, instructor announcements, course events and alerts (i.e., assignment due or feedback available)
• MyLearning Plan, the student’s window into the College advising, bursar, and registrar centers
• MyHomepage, the personalized profile and journal web space provided to all our community members. This space displays a set of (user configurable) information about the community member (name, hometown, work industry) along with a rich set of indicators reporting on the member’s activity within the larger College community (group and club memberships).

Additional value-added services are being developed, including an integrated calendar (tied to all in-course and community-wide events and alerts), a personalized student union dashboard (home to a student-run “newspaper,” member groups, clubs, and college-sponsored events), and other information services, business data, and personal tools (stock ticker, weather, etc.).

Enterprise course management
While the Ellis Community Learning Platform adopts a uniquely different approach to online learning environments, it also meets the requirements of a robust, enterprise course management system.

Authoring & Interaction Design
Course Design Templates – Course and component-level templates automatically define pedagogical structure, and enforce cross-course standards and guidelines.

Semantic XML Tagset – Courses are designed and instantiated using a semantic, XML-based representation. In this approach, course content is structured and codified by its pedagogical purpose rather than its visual display. This allows course developers to design courses using a “pedagogical design language,” and enforces separation of content, logic and presentation.

Roundtrip Editing/Publishing – Courses are authored “live,” enabling course developers to immediately see and test their designs within a feature-complete published version of the course.

Version Control – Individual content elements are automatically versioned during the editing process; whole courses can be versioned, exported for delivery and/or, archived.

Distributed Team Authoring – Database check-in/check-out of course elements allows multiple course developers to work simultaneously on a course.

Conditional Logic Framework – A scripting language supports parameters and rules to monitor student activity and progress in course, and to alter and personalize the course experience.

eXtensible Learning Components (XLCs) – A library of commonly-used interactive course elements that present information to the student based on XML parameters within the course and (optionally) pass student interaction parameters back to the course and/or student.

Shareable Content Libraries – A hierarchical repository and schema supports reusing and repurposing content.

Workflow and Project Management
Role-based – Role-based user accounts support a variety of job and testing functions: developer, tester, student, instructor, and administrator.

Course Tracker – Project management tools to define and track course development milestones.

Issue Tracking – Unified Issues Database enables users and groups to enter, track, and resolve, issues related to course design, development, testing, revision, instruction, and delivery.

Course Delivery & Instructor Class Management
Student Tracking – A suite of student-tracking tools allows instructors to monitor student performance, including course access, discussion activity (including comparisons to class averages), and concept tracking (mapping course elements to learning objectives, then monitoring student access to those course elements).

Integrated Gradebook & Team Management – Instructor tools that automatically track task deliverables, setting grades, and assigning and managing collaborative teams. Instructors can review all course discussions, and designate collaboration areas for the entire class; a small, temporal work group; or a private space accessible only by a single student and the instructor.

Live Editing of Courses in Delivery –Instructors can personalize the course and add-in timely news references during delivery; changes made by instructors are immediately published to the entire class.

In-context Grade Objects – Students hand-in assignments and receive grades and feedback directly where and when those task are required; students do not need to access a separate “drop box” that sits outside of the course learning experience.

Contextual Discussions – Every course content page contains an embedded asynchronous discussion space; questions and conversations about the course occur in context of the target material; students do not need to access a “bulletin board” outside of the course learning experience to talk.

Embedded Team Collaboration Spaces – Course pages within the course map can be set at the team level to provide teams with a secure discussion space directly linked to the page’s content; students do not need to access “team-rooms” that are separate from the learning experience.

Embedded Synchronous Framework – Awareness indicators based on class and team rosters, private instant messaging, and persistent class and team chat rooms are all embedded elements of the course environment.

Reliable and Scalable Software Architecture
Standards Based – Standards play a central role in the Ellis Community Learning Platform systems architecture. Key standards adopted include: web standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (HTML, CSS, HTTP), development standards from Sun (Java, EJB, JDBC) and the Object Management Group (UML, MDA).

Scalable – Implemented as an N-tier software architecture backed by an Oracle relational database, the system is designed for rapid scalability in a linear fashion with student enrollments.

Secure – The Ellis Community Learning Platform uses standard security measures, including authentication, authorization, and encrypted data transmission. Data are stored securely behind multiple firewalls.

Open Source – The Ellis Community Learning Platform is built on widely used open-source platforms, including the Linux operating system, Apache web servers, and Tomcat application servers.

The Ellis Community Learning Platform: Realizing the full potential of an online learning community
At the turn of the 20th century, philosopher John Dewey characterized the importance of the social dimension to learning when he said: “What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.”

More recently, in their seminal book The Social Life of Information, researchers John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid echoed Dewey’s insights. In describing how online Universities should consider the social dimension of learning, Brown and Duguid said:

It is a mistake to think of the university “delivering” knowledge or students as “receiving” it. Central to higher education is the way universities provide access to communities of scholars and testimony for a student’s experience among these communities. Consequently, universities should explore resources for bringing people together, not, as some interpretations of “distance education” suggest, for reinforcing their isolation.

Driven by these views, the Ellis Community Learning Platform seeks to “bring people together,” and ultimately, enable learning experiences that are engaging, effective, and unforgettable.

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