Early Learning Educational Platform-- Required Features

Here is a working list of the features and tools that would be available in a robust early learning educational platform.

• Need to create an educational and technical framework within which a variety of short and extended educational experiences can be incorporated.

• Needs to have a sustainable development and maintenance system in which people can contribute for short periods and be replaced without major disruption to the enterprise.

• Needs to be scalable so that the work can grow and yet still be managed.

• Needs to take advantage of existing material and accommodate new material.

• Needs to be able to handle text, audio and video formats…and any new formats.
  

• Needs to be able to use a variety of levels of manpower in effective ways—interested amateurs, county level extension staff, non-extension professionals, state-level extension staff, university faculty without extension appointments, undergraduate and graduate students.
  

• Includes convenient ways for people to contribute individually without much much efforts (e.g., Wikipedia model—in which when you encounter any page, you can register and contribute).

• Includes a range of short (e.g., text FAQs, 1 minute video or audio clips, etc.) and extended educational experiences
  

• Should include educational experiences that serve a range of types of learners from one-time, specific questions to in-depth experiences that would result in college credit. The platform would include all the levels in between.

• Needs to have ways for contributors to get credit.

• Needs to be designed in ways that foster credibility with the audiences. This might be different at different levels of the educational experiences.
  

• For each type of “contribution” there needs to be easy tools to use to contribute. For example, there are just a few steps to follow to upload a video onto YouTube. Likewise, on Wikipedia, the text editor is right there to use.
  

• There needs to be a variety of instructional tools—a text FAQ maker, a quiz maker, a tool to build an educational path that links a series of FAQs into a longer educational experience (from text FAQ to a factsheet that combines several FAQs to a series of factsheets that might be the equivalent of a “book chapter,” a series of chapters that might compose a book or course text.

• Other instructional tools would be a quiz maker that might use the FAQs, a data collection tool such as survey maker for collecting information that may serve as a variety of feedback, educational and scientific purposes, data presentation tools or ways to easily display charts and graphs, presentation tools or ways to incorporate audio & slides, or text and slides, or video, and probably more.
  

• Another instructional tool might be a “story-telling” tool that fosters the development of richer examples of understanding human development and family life concepts.
  

• This platform should include a variety of opportunities for social networking and community-building.

• What else?