I would like to take a brief moment to thank everyone who has worked with us over recent months to make Xplana.com a reality. In particular, I want to express my appreciation for all of you who made kind and helpful recommendations last week while we were in our “soft launch” mode.
Now that we are live, I also want to address some of the broader questions that some have asked, as well as discuss how Xplana.com will evolve in the coming months.
We want everyone to know that this first version represents only the beginning of our platform vision. Every product has to be pushed from the nest into the public eye, and we felt that this fall was the appropriate time to make our debut. As with any product launch, we were forced to make thoughtful decisions about what would not be included.
Some of you have asked about specific features you would like to see or about items you felt were missing. The good news is that all of these are already on our current list of upcoming enhancements or module development.
While we will be publishing our official roadmap in a few weeks, I thought it might be helpful to share some specific gaps that we are aware of, and enhancements that we plan to make.
RSS Feeds — Yes, we will be adding RSS feeds. This means that we will feature news feeds as part of our content library, and also provide feeds for user and community journals.
Journal Enhancements — We are also excited about our journals, and look forward to extending this tool with: named URLs, full rich text editor, and a robust portfolio theme.
Communities — We will be introducing more granular administrative controls, better customization, group authorship capabilities, and named URLs.
Flashcards — We will make this a richer activity with a basic template and faster authoring capabilities.
Embed Codes and Content Exports – We are committed to supporting various distributed models for content access. To that end, we will be adding embed codes for albums, as well as content export capabilities.
Creative Commons — We understand the importance of Creative Commons licensing, and are working to map our baseline permissions to different CC licenses. In a future release, we will roll out an advanced option that allows users to select a CC license and have that badge placed with their content.
In addition to these enhancements of our current features, there are also some larger projects on our radar. I am listing a few of them here as I believe this will help everyone gain a deeper insight into our product purpose and vision.
Mobile — We will launch our mobile applications for iPhone and Android in October and continue evolving our mobile options from that initial foundation.
LMS Integration — Xplana.com is designed a a complementary platform to traditional, formal learning solutions like the LMS. We are already working on our LMS integration strategy and will begin piloting options with university partners this year. Our goal is to join the content and student-focused informal learning options of Xplana.com with the other facets of the student’s learning life.
E-book Integrations – Students will be able to access purchased e-books in our platform this fall, but we plan to extent our e-book integration over the next year so that content can flow more freely between the e-book container and the other content and tools within our larger paltform.
Chat and Discussion — We certainly understand the importance of this element with regards to social interactivity, and are looking at a variety of alternatives. This will be something we add in the coming year, and we plan to use it to extend both individual and community interactions.
Expanded Support for Content Types — Much of our vision for Xplana.com is around our content library. To that end, we will continually expand the types of content that we support, both for physical upload as well as for virtual integration. In the coming year we will be expanding our support for file types, and also developing support for key content platforms such as Flickr and Slideshare.
Most important in all this is the fact that Xplana.com is a platform designed for you
— the student, the teacher, the educational technologist, the institutional administrator. And, as we continue to grow and evolve, there is one ingredient for success that outweighs all others — your feedback.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. I want to thank all who have offered suggestions and criticisms here at the beginning of our journey. Our hope is that you will find great value in our platform and that you will continue sending us your comments and suggestions so that we can make Xplana.com what it needs to be in order to serve you best.