Web Site Provides Professional Networking Environment, Next Generation of Course Management for College Students and Faculty

INDIANAPOLIS – It promises to do for college students’ professional lives what Facebook.com has done for their social lives – give them personal Web pages on which to showcase their learning outcomes and accomplishments across the globe.

“It” is Epsilen, short for Epsilen Environment Version 6, the software system available to college students and faculty who open accounts with the Web site www.epsilen.com.

Created by the CyberLab at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Epsilen offers students, as well as instructors and researchers, a package of software tools to support their academic, career, professional and social networking needs.

“It is a kind of comprehensive toolbox, a general purpose Swiss army knife that a student or faculty member needs at an university. It even has an integrated Course Management System (CMS),” said IUPUI Professor Ali Jafari, CyberLab founder and the architect and principal investigator of the Epsilen Environment.

With an Epsilen.com account:

• Students can create ePortfolios with resumes that can be shared with prospective employers or graduate schools.
• University faculty members can share their learning objects and collaborate with others researchers on a global Epsilen network and prepare their dossier.
• Students and faculty alike can intelligently find others with similar hobbies, career, and research interests in order to collaborate in various online Epsilen groups.

Since February, students and faculty members at 39 colleges and universities have created accounts on www.epsilen.com.

Currently more than 7,600 students and faculty members at Bowling Green State University have created and are actively using personal Epsilen Portfolio accounts, hosted locally in an earlier version of Epsilen.

“We look forward to using the ‘environment’ capabilities of the new Epsilen, where many other tools besides the ePortfolio are available,” said Professor Milton Hakel, the chair of ePortfolio initiative at Bowling Green State University. “With Epsilen 6, our student and faculty members can collaborate and socialize on academic and professional projects here and with others in different schools and universities.”

While these software tools or services are available from various vendors, until now, the tools weren’t available from a single package. Epsilen is conceptualized as the next generation of teaching and learning software environment offering ePortfolio software, group collaboration, peer review and learning assessment. The environment also offers a Course Management System (CMS) and an object repository. The entire software package is maintained and run within remote servers hosted by a third party. This allows students and faculty continued access to their work after switching schools, entering the job market or retiring.

“It certainly offers a new conceptual model, a new technology framework, and a new economical model to both the end users and the schools’ IT administrators,” Jafari said.

“Epsilen allows the user to create a public ePortfolio to promote themselves, their career and their body of work,” said Jeremy Reed, the lead developer of the Epsilen Environment. “It does some of the same things that Facebook does, but it is more about professional image rather than social image.”

The software system also gives account users control of access to their ePortfolio and other information, allowing them to “lock” the display of certain information, in essence making it visible to selected people and groups.

CyberLab is a research and development laboratory within the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI. CyberLab has initiated and developed several high-profile software environments, including the Oncourse and ANGEL course management systems. Oncourse is currently offering course management services to all eight campuses of Indiana University, and ANGEL is a commercial product licensed to ANGEL Learning, Inc.

While the long-term business plan calls for commercialization of Epsilen, CyberLab is now offering a one-year free Epsilen membership account to all U.S. students and faculty. Interested individuals can visit www.epsilen.com to register as a user. Indiana University Research and Technology Corporation also offers institutional licensing agreements to other colleges and universities. Interested faculty members are invited to use the Epsilen within the context of a course or a group of users.

For additional information about CyberLab or Epsilen, contact Ali Jafari at (317) 274-4565; visit Jafari’s Epsilen site at http://jafari.iupui.epsilen.com; or visit Milton Hakel’s Epsilen site: http://mhakel.with.bgsu.edu.