EcoLearnia Studio

EcoLearnia

Wouldn't it be great if children could learn having fun? How about if people that have mastered a subject can contribute with contents, and developers and designers can create interesting apps and games enriching the learners' experience?

EcoLearnia is addressing those questions by providing an online learning platform.

EcoLearnia's vision is to create a universal ecosystem for learning though knowledge sharing.

Think about Facebook and Wikipedia for learning!

EcoLearnia will allow people to create learning apps and contents. The apps and contents will be curated for quality. Student will learn and master skills engaging interactive content presented in gamified form for higher engagement. Ultimately the content usage data will be used for continuous efficacy improvement.

About EcoLearnia - The Big Picture

EcoLearnia is an open source learning platform that enables ecosystem of learning content production and consumption.

The consumers are people or entities that use the contents or their derivatives directly or indirectly:

• Learners (aka. students): those who use the system to learn a particular skill.
• Educators: those who use the system to teach skills. These users would usually organizing contents and assign them to learners, also consume the by products of the contents, such as the assessment results.
• Educational Institutions: second-tier providers of the content. Examples: Schools, Libraries, Museums, Academic institutions, etc.
• Learning Scientists: those who use the system to analyse the assessment results data together with the associated content. These users may use the data to answer questions such as: how does the content affect the cognitive process? What factors involves in learning? How can the efficacy be improved?

The producers are people or entities that creates content either private for closed group usage, or open (i.e. free license) for general consumption:

• Educators: educators are empowered with authoring tool so they can author original learning content, or modify existing one.
• App/Game Developers: developers can use the platforms libraries and APIs to produce apps that is deployed on top of the platform. Game is a good example of such app. The contents produced with open license are curated/moderated guarantee certain level of quality.

EcoLearnia Platform is provided under the licence as specified in the LICENSE file in the root directory.

EcoLearnia Components

EcoLearnia consists of:

• EcoLearnia Platform Server (EL-PS): The main server running in the cloud. Provides services such as: account, content, course, assignment, game, data analytics, etc. The server should be up in order for other components to operate.
• EcoLearnia Interactives (EL-I): The JavaScript client library that provides UI objects (widgets) that renders the content and handles interactions.
• EcoLearnia Studio (EL-S): The web-based content production tool for users to author contents. The preview uses the EL-I for rendering the UI objects.

NOTE: Currently The EL-I and EL-S are in the same repository. They will be eventually separated into different repos.

Installing EcoLearnia Studio

The system is based on nodejs and hapi framework.

Pre-requisites

• Have an instance of EL-S running, accessible through network (could be local).
• Have nodejs installed. Recommended version is 0.12.x
• Have git client installed.

Downloading and building

The easiest way to install the EL-S is to clone the repository from github

git clone https://github.com/altenia/ecolearnia-studio.git

Once cloned, go the ecolearnia-studio directory and install the dependencies

npm install

Then build the EL-I

npm run build-inter

And finally build the EL-S

npm run build-client

Directory Structure

• artifacts: Includes documentation and other non-source-code artifacts
• client: Client-side source code
• cohevium-content: Includes HTML pages for the authoring tool
• config: Contains the configuration file
• node_modules: nodejs' packages
• public: Web server's public folder. It contains public assets such as css.
• el-studio.js: The main execution script
• LICENSE: The license of this software

Configuring the Server

The server configuration file is config/ecolearnia-studio.conf.json.

{
    "port": 8080,

    "cohevium": {
      "publicPath": "public",
      "contentBaseDir": "cohevium-content"
    },

    "log": {
        "level": "debug",
    }
}

NOTE: EL-S uses Cohevium, an lightweight CMS packaged in form of hapi plugin.

Running the Server

To run in normal mode: node el-studio.js

To run in debug mode: node --debug el-studio.js

See the reference below - development link - for further detail on running in debug mode.

Development

For development of the interactives and extending the tool, please see the references below.

Basic User Guide

http://localhost:8080/cohevium/content/content-browse.html

The initial page includes the main navigation. The user can search and browse content nodes and items. Selecting a node or item will open up the the editing page.

References

• EcoLearnia server repository
• EcoLearnia content doc repository
• Interactives development: artifacs/docs/interactives-dev.md
• Studio development: artifacs/docs/studio-dev.md

LICENSE

Contributing

Education is not in hands of few organizations, but it’s everyone’s business. We should all be participant, actively collaborating to the disseminating knowledge to our kids and generations to come.

Your contribution and support is highly valuable. We invite you to be an active participant of the education fostering community.

Feel free to fork and improve/enhance EcoLearnia any way you want. If you feel that the system or the Ace community will benefit from your changes, please open a pull request.