EduXs: multilayer educational services platforms

How to use the online social learning communities to improve quality and quantity of interactions in physical social learning communities is an important issue. This work describes the design and implementation of multilayer educational services platforms that enable learners to establish their own online social learning communities and integrate their online social learning communities into a large public social learning portal site—EduCities. Multilayer educational services platforms were designed to integrate various individual online social learning communities, and to map these communities into physical social learning communities. This work proposes and implements an architecture called EduXs, and integrates it with K-12 social learning communities. One year after the EduXs system was released on the Internet, 1,849 schools, 15,772 classes, and 130,908 individuals in Taiwan had registered to use the system to construct their own online social learning communities. Among these registered users, 18.8% of registered schools, and 24.7% of registered classes continue to use the system. Evaluation results indicate that the system is accepted by teachers and students. # 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.