Xplana Announces a Major Innovation in Student Learning

COLUMBIA, Mo., July 20 /PRNewswire/ -- This August, Xplana, a division of MBS Service Company, Inc., will launch the first ever platform that bridges social networking and traditional elements of student learning to transform the way students manage their academic lives.  

"Xplana is best described as the social network for learning," Dennis Flanagan, Chief Executive Officer of Xplana, said. "It's the first ever 'social learning' platform designed to bring the entire student learning life into a single location."

Xplana is completely free to any learner and contains a number of embedded tools that allow students to create study guides, upload documents and media, and connect with other students to help focus and organize their studies. Xplana also provides students access to their purchased e-textbooks and enables them to synchronize their notes and annotations.

In addition, Xplana delivers open academic resources that are collected from across the Web directly to students, further simplifying the learning experience.

"Xplana removes difficulty and complexity from the studying equation by giving students the resources they're looking for," Rob Reynolds, Director of Product Design and Research, said. "No longer will they be punished for not being able to find the needle in the haystack."

According to its corporate office, Xplana has already indexed more than 200,000 resources and is expected to have more than a million in the coming year.

The initial Xplana launch will also offer a mobile application for the iPhone and Android devices. With the mobile application, students can access their materials, take notes, and make annotations anywhere, anytime. Any updates they make will automatically sync up with the online version the next time they log in.

Flanagan said another benefit of the Xplana platform is that students will have access to their resources long after they've completed their coursework.

"We've designed this platform to encourage lifelong learning among students," Flanagan said. "That's why student content never expires, so they can reference materials days, months, or years down the road."

Xplana also plans to expand its platform to offer full integration with popular Learning Management System (LMS) platforms and institutional information systems later this fall.

"It is our goal to help revitalize the learning experience for students," Reynolds said. "Students will learn more efficiently, stay connected to their peers more easily, and have new avenues for collaboration at their finger tips."

About Xplana

Xplana is an online social learning platform that connects learners to content and communities. The platform is free to students and features an open, modular architecture that provides an organized learning context for useful learning content and tools scattered about the Web. It simplifies the learning process by connecting students' informal learning outside of the classroom with the formal platforms and structures of schools and institutions. Additionally, Xplana serves as an access and distribution point for premium content from educational publishers and other premium content providers, targeted to the specific academic subject need of the student.

For more information about Xplana, contact Rob Reynolds at [email protected] or 573-239-9025.

SOURCE Xplana