Educational Collaboration Space

The Educational Collaboration Space (ECS) provides a powerful and flexible open source tool for building focused communities of teachers. This software is freely available to all.

An earlier version, Math CI Space, was conceived of and built in the Department of Mathematics at MIT as a way to encourage discussion among lecturers giving diverse courses with similar structure and challenges, specifically in the area of teaching communication skills, and to archive course material and successful practices emerging from those discussions. It has been in use in Mathematics since 2009.

The ECS distills this work and offers a general purpose platform for pedagogical collaboration. Take a look at the demo site. This is a WordPress site with specially written plugins, a custom built theme, and a template for the content. The plugins, theme, and template along with user-friendly instructions for creating a collaborative website anywhere are now available at the ECS Installation Instructions site.

The ECS is designed to encourage and support collaboration. Here are some suggestions for engaging participation in this activity.

This work was funded by the MIT Department of Mathematics, the MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Techology, and the National Science Foundation.

Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have, and send us feedback on your experience with this demo! We hope you find this tool useful!

ECS team (ecs-contact@mit.edu):
Violeta Ivanova
Brett Mellor
Haynes Miller
Susan Ruff

Contributors:
Sami Assaf
David Blum
Mitcho Erlewine
Mia Mines
Lika Yurkovetsky