About Scholar

Scholar is new way to think, read, write, and learn for a digital age that is increasingly global, connected, diverse, information-intensive, and always changing.

Unlike tests of old, Scholar offers different kinds of rich, formative feedback, so that all assessment is "for learning" and not just "of learning."
 

Music: Easy Lemon Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

“... [My students] are listening to each other. I have been giving them comments all year, and mostly they ignore those. But [in Scholar] they seem to hear each other!” - teacher response

“What’s exciting to me [about Scholar] is that we’re going all the way through to publishing these stories. I’m like a publisher and you’re going to be authors and creators, and we’re going to take these stories all the way through and help each other ... ” - teacher response
 

A Next-Generation Solution

Scholar is designed around the metaphor of how scholarly knowledge-communities work. In Scholar, students gather into communities to create and share their learning with one another. These online communities can supplement traditional classrooms or serve as virtual, distributed communities.

As students draft their knowledge work, they receive and act on feedback from peer-contributors. Ultimately, student-creators seek from their teacher-publishers a green-light to publish their successful works in shared spaces. 

Currently, Scholar consists of three main spaces that help to structure formal and informal learning: Creator, Publisher, and Community.

Creator

A web-authoring space where students not only write, but also create multimodal texts that include image, video, and sound. In today’s world, there can be much more to representing knowledge than the traditional idea of written ‘text.’

Publisher

A space for planning and managing writing projects with structured steps and due dates, including stages of drafting, feedback, revision, and publishing.

Community

A social-media space for class interaction. This is a secure, private space where teachers and their students can discuss their learning and present their completed works—a hybrid that seems at times a bit like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and LinkedIn. However, none of these social media is well suited for learning. Scholar is held together by a significantly different kind of social glue—not ‘friends,’ ‘followers,’ or ‘contacts,’ but knowledge sharing ‘peers’ who working together in a knowledge-producing ‘community.’

Coming Soon

Two more modules are coming soon: Bookstore, where teachers can publish works into student and class knowledge portfolios, and Conference, where teachers and students can plan in-person and ‘virtual’ knowledge presentations.