This article was published on August 10, 2010

Xplana launches free, online, collaborative educational tools.


Xplana launches free, online, collaborative educational tools.

Bill Gates recently revealed his belief that within 5 years, the best lectures in the world will be available for free on the web.  Xplana.com holds a similar belief, launching an online learning platform for students, educators and institutions, featuring 200,000 free learning materials including; as textbooks, course notes and lectures.

By January, Xplana hopes to have 1 million materials in its database, making it the world’s largest collection of online learning materials.  Going further, Xplana aims to be an educational social network of sorts, becoming a fully-functional social learning platform with online learning management capabilities.

How does Xplana plan to conquer the world of online, social learning?   Xplana will focus their efforts on content, the desire for students to connect with one another and provide a one-stop shop for a student’s online learning needs.


Students using the service can take notes directly on their e-textbooks, share notes with classmates, and create study groups, post videos and images, all with the ability to share them with classmates.   Further, content on the site uses a voting model similar to Digg, providing users with information on what content is less worthy of their consideration, which will also be moved to the bottom of a student’s search results.

Some of the other features of Xplana include:

  • Friends and friend groups .
  • Profiles and status updates through customizable user pages.
  • Journal/Blog for each user.
  • Communities.
  • Messaging capabilities.
  • Sharing content via Email, Facebook and Twitter.

Xplana is free to join and should prove to be an invaluable resource for students, instructors and administrators.

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