Challenge:Find a suitable social publishing platform that can support the Encyclopedia of Earths rapid growth and provide professional grade social networking capabilities within a scalable content management system.
The CAMEL project needed an effective way to promote the sharing of up to date information generated by the scientific community into the classroom.
The challenge was to create online classrooms where teachers and students could gather and interact around learning materials more effectively than has been possible to date.
Technical hurdles included combining important attributes of expensive proprietary platforms currently used by schools with the open, easy-to-use attributes of social networking sites.
Solution: The Trunity platform was selected for its on demand architecture, ease of use and flexible yet robust content management and social publishing/collaboration tools:
The platform’s ability to easily build online private gated communities — complete with integrated content management and social publishing/ networking functionality — will allow hundreds of online virtual classroom environments to be quickly deployed across multiple universities via a handful of approved “master” virtual textbook/learning environment templates.
Each virtual textbook/learning environment master template is built with content Encyclopedia of Earth and other expert content websites using Live Cross- Publishing tools. Once a new university class is created from the template, the professor teaching the class can customize and re-arrange the virtual textbook content for their particular classroom needs, while simultaneously assuring that any content added via Live Cross-Publishing will automatically and continuously be update the latest and most up-to-date version from the original sources.
In addition to allowing discussions carried on between students and students with professors in the same class, the platform allows discussions to be easily shared between different classes and universities, enabling much broader and more dynamic interaction than is possible with more traditional “siloed” e-learning solutions.
Students may also create their own “project websites” on the platform for doing class projects, reports, virtual term papers, etc. Using built-in Live Cross Publishing and networking tools, these sites can be flexibly integrated with the main virtual classroom site as well as with other students’ sites, enabling much more robust and dynamic online collaboration than is possible with other solutions.
Results: A new generation of online classrooms will be used for this application, throughout higher education, and by informal learning communities. CAMEL’s online presence will alleviate the need for costly resources like textbooks, providing students and professors with trusted information without a financial burden.
EoE has been able to drastically expand the types of content as well as the depth of knowledge navigation.
The EoE has now been able to effectively marry the high productivity of online “crowd sourcing” from experts with the editorial quality control typically associated with more traditional off-line encyclopedias.
New ways of re-using EoE content for educational (such as the NSF sponsored CAMEL project) and social media applications are now possible and underway.
The EoE has been able to eliminate the expense of its own IT staff, plus it is now able to implement new value-added applications enabled by the Trunity platform in order to expand EoE influence and generate operating revenue.
Contact our sales team to learn more about the ways the Trunity platform has benefitted CAMEL.