Intro

Authoring

Sharing

Discovery

Copyright

Delivery

Stay Informed

Blackboard xpLor will be available in the Summer of 2013.

To stay up-to-date on the latest for this education changing product, sign-up to learn more.

Schools are migrating their operations towards the Internet faster than ever. Over the last 15 years, the Learning Management System (LMS) has transformed education enabling educators to create rich interactive learning materials, effective online assessments,and interactive discussion. But many educators still use multiple resources to keep track of course materials, unable to consolidate them because there are different systems on different servers that don't work together.

It’s time to take a step forward in virtual education with the first cross-platform learning object repository. XpLor implements modern software standards and removes the restrictions of LMS-based software allowing you to incorporate content from multiple sources with unprecedented ease. The LMS integrated with xpLor is the ideal solution, leveraging the strengths of the LMS and solving the problems of content management that limit the LMS by moving content to a repository in the cloud.

Here's how xpLor will change teaching and learning as we know it today:

Course materials tend to get replicated several times on a platform. Even after your LMS addresses these redundancies, it’s still hard to share with other platforms due to authoring restrictions.

With xpLor, you have the ability to create modern, content-rich course materials using the robust tool set of an LMS while remaining outside the tight parameters of the LMS to allow flexibility and collaborative authoring.

Currently, you’re stuck manually exporting and importing vast amounts of course materials from one LMS to another. This results in multiple copies of the same material with no way to track updates back to the original or apply rights or copyright.

Share rich content with xpLor between systems inside the cloud without importing and exporting. Versioning controls keep you aware of modifications without bogging down in multiple versions of the same document.

Searching for content is difficult in traditional LMS. Without tags or indexes, you’re searching blindly. Shared content is not integrated with the LMS and there is no way to "subscribe" to channels or "follow" authors.

xpLor has a rich global search engine that can find content shared globally or in specific channels integrated with your LMS. Advanced filtering functions by keyword, contributor or subject equal less time spent looking in the wrong place. It's easy to subscribe to channels of interest or follow specific authors.

Now your content floats around multiple systems, often without the appropriate rights and permissions attached to it, making it hard to track or protect.

xpLor offers a wide variety of protection, from All Rights Reserved to Creative Commons open sharing built into the system making it easy to find the right license. Authors can choose how to copyright and share their materials and maintain those permissions no matter where the materials reside.

There is no clear way to ensure content-rich media reaches other systems intact. This compromises the integrity of your deliverables. Content has to be imported into the LMS to be delivered then it becomes LMS content making it hard to move to other systems.

XpLor possesses a neutral interface that allows instructors to deliver assessments, discussions, and mixed-media objects seamlessly across multiple courses systems simultaneously, in any sequence or configuration you choose. And still passes completion of assessments on to gradebook of LMS.