Columbia, October 11 -- CANS ( http://www.cansaware.com ), an open source software product that enables social navigation in eLearning environments today announced a partnership with LANIT Consulting Inc., to integrate CANS social navigation and awareness capabilities into LANIT’s industry leading electronic portfolio product, Foliotek. The integration of CANS provides Foliotek customers with awareness capabilities that have been shown to boost online collaboration.
“Portfolios are dynamic, so it makes sense to allow Foliotek students to promote awareness of their accomplishments among a chosen network of peers and collaborators. CANS enables students to push portfolio notifications to anyone, and also allows authorized faculty to pull portfolio notifications for students they review”, said Chris Miller, President of LANIT. “The integration of CANS with Foliotek promises to increase the sense of connection between a student and their portfolio. Since CANS is also integrated with popular course management systems, the option of obtaining a single notification for course activity and portfolio activity will be powerful – It brings the portfolio closer to the action”.
CANS is also integrated with the open source course management systems like Sakai. The integration of social awareness and navigation, particularly in online learning environments, has been shown to increase student satisfaction, sense of community and learning outcomes. Instructors have benefited from a more robust toolset for supporting collaborative learning online. For example, a student in a group may want to know when the instructor has posted an assignment and have that information immediately emailed or delivered via a desktop widget (a small application that can always be visible on one’s desktop). The student may want to see who has posted new messages or read existing messages, but only want that information when they enter the course website. An instructor may want the same information but want it organized in a table to see who has contributed and how much to a discussion. Thus the awareness information is a resource for instructors and students in knowing when and how to act, and also a tool for an instructor to quickly make sense of what is going on in the course, how to assess what is going on, and identify appropriate next steps for the class or individual students.
A social navigation and awareness infrastructure provided by CANS, integrated with both Foliotek and Course management systems, will help colleges and universities around the country realize the promise of integrated, highly connected online learning communities.