What is Epsilen?   

Epsilen places social networking and ePortfolio in the center of eLearning and CMS creating a totally new environment for the next generation of learners and professionals. Epsilen goes beyond other popular networking sites, connecting peers and enabling meaningful knowledge and object exchanges. Epsilen is also a comprehensive software package that provides wide-ranging tools and services that students and professionals need for their day-to-day learning, teaching, and networking. The only requirement to use Epsilen is a computer (PC or Mac) with Internet connection. Epsilen contains software packages for ePortfolio, Course Management System (Personal CMS), lifelong repository, e-mail, blog, social and professional networking, groups, personal portal, and career management. Also think of Epsilen as your lifelong personal cyberspace that travels with you between schools and colleges during and after your formal education.

How does Epsilen work?

Epsilen members’ collections(files, courses, etc) and data are securely stored in a remote central database accessible from school, home, work, or anywhere via the Internet. An Epsilen member has total control for sharing his personal portfolio and collections with schoolmates, teachers, or potential employers, as well as social and professional groups. Additionally, each Epsilen member has a personal Web site (ePortfolio) with a lifelong Web address (URL). 

Upon sign-in, an Epsilen member may access any of a number of internal application software packages and tools. Within the Epsilen Environment is an ePortfolio management software package where members can create and maintain personal ePortfolios and Web sites, where teachers can use the Course Management System (CMS) to put course content online so students receive complementary learning material and can interact with classmates outside the classroom, and where members can use the extensive resume and career builder software to create resumes or curriculum vita (CV) and produce career portfolios. Furthermore, the networking software built into the Epsilen Environment can intuitively connect students, faculty, and professionals according to their academic, professional, and social communities.

Imagine that in a mature Epsilen environment a faculty member can automatically determine how many professors from other schools throughout the world are teaching the same course or are sharing their learning objects. This may create new opportunities for the research and professional community within the same interest group. Imagine that students can participate in various global learning groups besides those within their campus, and envision that those students may also dynamically learn about potential job opportunities matched with their academic and career interests, sharing their portfolios for job placement throughout the world.

Other Epsilen Benefit$

The Epsilen design is also based on a new economic model that offers a cost-effective solution for schools, colleges, and university administrators seeking to reduce the increasing costs of IT services. Using the Epsilen hosted model, schools are no longer required to locally maintain computer servers to host software nor retain numerous technical experts for day-to-day technical support. Indeed, Epsilen offers many tools within one package that substantially reduces the combined cost of software obtained separately from various vendors. Using the Epsilen hybrid open source model, Epsilen can interface with the campus Student Information System databases for dynamic creation and maintenance of member accounts, ePortfolios, and course accounts.

Major software tools available within the Epsilen Environment
As illustrated in Figure 1, the software packages within the Epsilen Environment include:

• A complete ePortfolio management system to support creation of various personal and institutional ePortfolio sites, including student learning portfolios, faculty portfolios, career portfolios, and alumni and professional portfolios.
• An easy-to-use Course Management System (CMS) called Personal CMS that provides course authoring and course Web site creation for some or all campus courses. Epsieln Personal CMS can be used to complement a lecture-based course or be used to offer an online distance learning course.
• Professional networking for interaction and collaboration with academic and professional peers across the global community, just as other sites similarly and successfully offers social networking and entertainment among college students.
• A lifelong repository space where student and faculty members can create and store learning and professional outcomes in electronic format (academic papers, creative art, etc.). Students may wish to share their collection with potential employers while faculty members may want to have it reviewed and rated by peers for tenure or promotion needs.
• An internal e-mail system with unique and smart functionality. More and more students are switching from their campus e-mail accounts to commercial e-mail accounts such as Gmail and Hotmail, and with Epsilen, they will soon learn the importance and desirability of upgraded services that the cost-effective internal Epsilen e-mail system offers, such as automatically blocking junk or spam e-mail messages.
• A personal intelligent agent, called Pomegranate Agent, which Epsilen provides to each user. The Pomegranate agent is another internal built-in software component within the Epsilen Environment that makes it smart and intuitive, with capabilities to think, to reason, and to act and react intelligently according to a member’s personal interests and past performance. You can think of Epsilen with its Pomegranate Agent, as you would think of your own personal administrative assistant helping you with your day-to-day business activities.