iEARN announces the launch of a new iEARN Collaboration Centre, a custom-built platform designed to support iEARN’s global project-based learning network of 50,000 member teachers and 2 million student participants in over 130 countries worldwide. The site is a safe and secure, global, multilingual, educational environment, and provides for the kind of distributed management required for scalability and worldwide local adaptability.
In order to best serve the needs of the growing network, the teams at Minds On Design Lab and Arkus Inc helped iEARN-USA to develop a number of new functionalities to improve collaboration, accessibility, speed, and user management, while giving teachers and students cutting-edge, industry-standard tools for their collaborative project work. The platform uses cloud computing to convert videos to web and mobile compatible formats through Zencoder, the largest cloud-based video encoding service in the market. Through support from the Salesforce Foundation, the site also provides country coordinators with new user management tools to effectively manage the thousands of teachers and students who are engaged in online collaborative educational projects.
The end result is an intuitive, secure and totally collaborative online space in which an expanded number of teachers and students will be able to learn with the world and go beyond simply learning about it.
We will continue working hard in the coming weeks and months to make the transition for current iEARN participants as smooth as possible, and will be continuing to add improvements and new features to support participants’ global project work. The earlier iEARN Collaboration Centre forums (foro.iearn.org) will remain available as a reference site for the next few months – this means that it will continue as a “read-only” site, where iEARN participants can still login and browse old forum discussions, and additionally use the people search until this feature is live on the new site.
Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with us anytime via the Help section of the site if you have questions or feedback. We are very excited about the site, but even more so about making everyone’s experience of it a great one.
The mission of iEARN is to enable young people worldwide, working in collaboration and respectful dialogue, to make a meaningful contribution to the health and welfare of the planet and its people. This new platform is a key piece of fulfilling that mission.
