Agora - Virtual Learning Environment

The Virtual Learning Environment was one of my favorite projects. Revolutionary at the time, it provided an opportunity for museums across Canada to easily contribute structured information and media assets in the form of standards-compliant learning resources through remote software interfaces. These resources could then be disassembled, reassembled, aggregated, annotated, and basically created into new compositions by teachers. The virtual learning environment also contained a set of tools (Blog, Wiki, messaging, video conferencing, assignement delivery and tracking, etc.) to facilitate collaborative working among museum educators, teachers, and students. I led the design of the project from concept, through research, architecture and design, and development. The prototype involved 6 Canadian musems who helped prove out the design through the development and testing phases. The software has since been used by over 150 museums from across the country. The project was published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGGRAPH - the world's largest design conference. I was invited to present my work on this project at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in 2007.

The Agora Virtual Learning Environment main user interface

Agora - Learning Resource (public/published interface)