Jul: CommonAcademy's new look

 CommonAcademy, an online learning platform, has undergone a revamp recently. 

From its user-friendly interface to its extensive functionality, this greatly improved version of CommonAcademy is more than ready to hit the market.

 As many as 38,000 teachers in Singapore are already using this as a portal to facilitate online learning.

Main highlights:

Course Authoring

Course authoring is central to all Learning Content Management System (LCMS). Having this feature developed well depicts the difference between a great LCMS and a bad one. CommonAcademy’s course authoring tools stands out from the rest as it is developed based on research of how expert educators go about developing a course. Many expert educators have been found to design their course through a top down approach; this compromises of starting with the skeleton of the course (i.e. the table of content) before adding materials to each chapter of the course. This is exactly the way course authoring is done in CommonAcademy. Such a process of course creation is however not common among many LCMSs in the market. This is a shift away from the traditional LCMSs structure that are too content focused (and thus neglecting the big picture). CommonAcademy could very well be a professional course author’s dream!

Resource Content Storage

Many LCMS has the ability to store learning content for users to tap on. Many however simply provide storage and do nothing else. CommonAcademy’s content repository allows one to store information based on their taxonomies and meta-data tagging (e.g. tagging keywords and digital rights management). This allows for easy search and tracking of copyrights of digital content uploaded into the system. Various versions of uploaded content are also stored to allow one to restore back to previous versions.

Collaboration
Collaborating among peers and superiors plays a key part in professional development. Most LCMS tools for collaboration have often been cited to be foreign to general users. This results in users finding it tough to use and hence alienate it altogether. To overcome this, CommonAcademy uses features that are found in many popular social networking websites such as chat, walls, blogs and discussion forums. The use of such popular features for collaboration will help users to easily adapt to the usage of the system.