With one million active users it's learning is one of the world's leading learning platforms designed specifically for the educational sector. The platform supports students and teachers in all aspects of the learning process. This is it's learning's development Road Map for 2010
3. Product Strategy – focus areas Focus on the individual learner The platform as a ecosystem for digital content and tools Collaboration and sharing across sites Aggregating data and introducing new roles (parents, principal, mentor) Strengthen support for core workflow in schools
5. School autonomy Allow sites to have autonomous hierarchies for schools All courses, projects, users, mentors, exams will be owned by a hierarchy. Administrators can only see and manage users, courses, projects, mentors, exams from their school/faculty hierarchy New features such as attendance, policies etc. can be customised at a school levels.
6. eSafety & communication levels Ensure a safe environment for learners Control who can see specific profiles Control who can communicate with who Profanity filtering and bullying protection
7. Policies A better way to edit permissions Can be applied to users, hierarchies, and profiles Several policies may be combined No comm. Communication restrictions
8. Attendance 2.0 Dynamic codes Multi-session Workflow support Teacher, mentor and student reports and overview Improved UI
9. ParentEngagementDashboard Home–School communication Information about children's work, development and presence eSafety – restricting parent access Supporting national guidelines for parents involvement
10. National guidelines Norway: Utdanningsdirektoratet Datatilsynet Uninett ABC UK: Department for children, schools and families Becta Sweden: Skolverket USA: U.S. Department of Education
12. Themes & new GUI New GUI withoutframes Easy to develop themes All skins will be migrated to themes A site can have several themes Users can choose their own themes
18. Sharing Simple and user-friendly solution for sharing content Private library for organising personal content Share with: private individuals (later) own institution (February 2010) all it’s learning users (February 2010) (Not all applications can be used for sharing when we release)
22. Extensions / SDK Contains the same APIs and tools we use internally Distribution solution for free and commercial extensions integrated in it’s learning Application SDK beta released in June 2009 – currently more than 300 developers have signed up Developer program for partners and customers Interested? Visit: developer.itslearning.com
With the eSafety features and communication levels we want to make it’s learning safer, especially for learners. We plan to implement features which ensures a safe environment for learners, and tools to detect and prove bullying.It will be easier to control who can see and contact each other. If, for example, a learner is bullied by another learner it will be possible to restrict the communication between these two learners.
In the current version of it’s learning we have to edit existing profiles or create new profiles to change the permissions of a set of users. We plan to make this simpler by creating what we call “policies”, and thus be able to reduce the number of profiles. A policy is a collection of profile settings that can be applied to users, hierarchies, and profiles. Two or more policies can be combined. It is possible to both limit your rights – or provide you with extra.A policy will override the profile / user settings according to a set of policy rules.
Today, few schools or Local Authorities offer parents satisfactory solutions for secure online access to information about their child’s learning. Although parental involvement is key to a child’s educational success, over 50% of parents say they are in contact with their child’s school just once a term or less. 89% of parents say technology could help them become better informed about their child’s education.A key factor is keeping the parents engaged in the education. To facilitate this, it’s learning is developing a parent engagement dashboard in the learning platform which will give parents a simple and secure login to a web interface, allowing them to follow their child’s education.Many solutions can provide statistics and numbers, but we show parents what their child needs to learn, how to learn it and why to learn it – it reveals what the child needs to learn today to succeed tomorrow.Information about the day-to-day school work is only a few clicks away – all a parent needs to follow-up and engage in the child’s daily progress. The parent engagement dashboard cannot replace face to-face conversations, but it complements and enhances the quality of discussions by giving timely and meaningful information to parents.
This is how we have planned the graphical user-interface.
Today the teachers rule it’s learning. They create the content, upload files, add notes and so on. This year we will add features that will involve the learners more in the content added in it’s learning. Learners will be allowed to organise things the way they want with personal tags, and they can add their own notes and reflections.Another important feature is comments. The learners can comment on files and other items that the teachers create or upload, and this will stimulate discussions and cooperation about content that previously could not be discussed.The search will also be enhanced.
Our customers want to share, and this is one of our main priorities in 2009. We will make it possible to create own applications with the Software development kit, and then we must have a way of sharing content that is created. We plan to make a private library for organising personal content. From this library it will be possible to share the content with private individual, members of your own institution or all it’s learning users.
This picture shows the new Library. Previously, content was stored in the courses. It will be possible to store content in the library. Content can be reused in several courses, and can be shared. We will support new methods of organising, such as tagging and curriculum.
Current it’s learning users know that content is added by entering a course and adding or importing content.Shown in the screen shot is a new way of adding content. The users enter their personal library and add their own content. It is also possible to find things that are shared in the library of your institution or communities. It will be possible to find resources that are tagged with, for example, curriculums.
An example of a personalized skin on the dashboard.
