Back to school: Microportals allow educators to turn traditional classroom into interactive research and collaboration center - Alfa-XP Web Software Company's Virtual Classroom System

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, August 18, 2003

Making Learning Process More Productive, More Practical and Fun

College professors are getting ready for the fall semester, and will appreciate the new Virtual Classroom System, the latest offering from the Alfa-XP Web Software Company, LLC (www.alfa-xp.com), the maker and operator of the Microportals.NET Web application service.

Virtual classroom is a "portal-on-demand" service that offers everything needed to teach a class. It's template-based, reliable and secure. Social science professors with minimum computer skills can easily customize and manage it in real-time, using nothing but Web browsers. No hardware, software or programming are necessary. Built exclusively on the Microsoft .NET platform and open XML standards, it can be easily integrated with other popular e-learning software (e.g., Blackboard).

Within minutes, anyone can create a full-featured personal intranet, complete with Web templates, multiple secure workspaces for the professor and students and visual tutorials. Authorized users can create and edit Web pages, upload, organize and share files, images and Web links, look up contact information and photos of classmates, access class schedule and make appointments, participate in public and private discussions, read relevant, automatically updated news feeds selected from thousands of reputable sources and topics, set up private and shared workspaces for group projects, create and participate in online polls and surveys. Professors get email, mailing lists, customizable datasheet templates (e.g., attendance, assignments, etc.), notepad, private folders, and site administration tools.

Research center is one feature that really sets this product apart from competitors. It allows collaborative use of automated content collection, ranking and annotation tools for purposes of creating a shared, topic-oriented, recommendation-based knowledge base. Students work on research assignments running queries using multiple search gateways (e.g., Google) while guided by subject categories (taxonomies) created by the professor. The results get bookmarked, ranked, annotated and stored in the shared library.