Xplana.com apps, ebook support coming this fall
It’s been a week since the launch and none of the digital reading blogs have covered Xplana.com yet. Weird.
Rob Reynolds posted a status update on the Xplana blog on Monday. Some features of the Xplana platform have been delayed, which is understandable. I don’t think much of the platform, and I said so before. TBH, that could be because I’m not a group person. So long as I have my ow notebook handy I’m good. I don’t need the collaboration abilities that Xplana.com gives you.
From the blog post:
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 int he 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
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