Essentia eKnow Knowledge Delivery Platform

Essentia eKnow (electronic knowledge now) education solutions address the many challenges to digitization and
IT enablement in public and private educational institutions across a broad spectrum of schools, colleges, universities and technical institutions. Essentia provides strategy, implementation, integration, production, cloud
services, training and support to educators, and helps them analyze their complex requirements under fast
growing and competitive environments and assists putting in place initiatives towards achieving their vision of
creating world class institutions.

Essentia eKnow introduces revolutionary new capabilities providing institutions with opportunities for expansion into new geographies resulting in cost reduction and the ability to tap into new revenue streams . Students using Essentia eKnow benet from improved learning and research capabilities and the improved ability to interact with the industry preparing them for better job opportunities in today's digitized world. The Essentia eKnow platform, when combined with the deep expertise of Essentia's customers in the eld of education, creates a technology enabled education environment of international standards and paves the way to delivering higher quality education to a wider audience cost eectively and eciently.

Essentia eKnow provides dramatic improvements across academic, administrative, research and placement processes. The challenges and barriers are many in getting sta and students to learn and actively use these processes. Achieving smooth running ecient operations is elusive due to a variety of factors. Incorporating basic technology like digitized class rooms and the use of internet in class rooms for content are relatively straightforward. Getting faculty and research sta to organize their activities and to use proven electronic teaching methods combined with using online research environments for knowledge delivery, research data collection and technical problem solving are the next frontiers that need to be overcome.

The goals of achieving consistency, high throughput, and many to many online collaborations between students, teachers, mentors and researchers is challenging. Bringing in world class experts regardless of their geography or time zone into the class rooms or research labs to deliver cutting edge education is another challenge and this can happen only through infrequent campus visits in a complete online environment. Realizing exponential value of all investments made in skilled faculty, administrative sta and systems, academic and research infrastructure and IT infrastructure happens only when all these systems are truly integrated. Essentia specializes in integrating diverse environments to deliver this untapped value from investments already made by educational institutions. World class status will be elusive with out achieving these capabilities.. Essentia eKnow is built with a revolutionary unifying architecture that provides the foundation for delivering dierent types of knowledge based services to all stake holders, including but not limited to, students, teachers, parents, administrators, regulators, specialist education service providers and owners. This framework provides fundamental services that start with stakeholder-centric portals which can be accessed via computers or mobile phones enabling them to learn, share, practice, collaborate, communicate, clarify, establish and follow procedures, to accommodate ever changing regulatory policies and to provide feedback and improve all essential institution processes. Implementing and following a "localized" adaptation of the Bologna process ensures best-in-class outcomes and this is facilitated using Essentia eKnow.


Examples of such innovations routinely deployed by Essentia include:

• Mobile enabling many basic data entry and information retrieval processes. Example – Taking attendance in
class using a mobile device provides accuracy, convenience and real time availability.

• Live broadcast and video collaboration is available to all students, sta, researchers and other stake holders
to hold live conversations with both local and remote participants and to speed up understanding, decision
making and achieving quick breakthrough on issues through real time interactions.

• Real-Time Intelligence and Analytics on multi-disciplinary functions across all key processes in areas related
to academia, research, administration, examination and certication.

• Site and project level content management

• Advanced banners, commerce, and dynamic cataloging

• Marketing and tracking tool integration with customizable tracking codes

• Centralized, robust framework

• Unique Ecosystem Enablement for rapid community on-boarding

eKnow Feature List

Multi-Portal System • Tailored portals targeted to specific student age groups (primary, middle, high school) • Rich Content Management System for self service user experience for both educator generated and student generated content. Custom configurable look and feel, support for html pages, office documents, flash, images, graphics, videos, animation and immersion (support for all popular formats) • Configurable portals for students, educators, Content creators and administrator • Adheres to standard accessibility guidelines Robust extensible standards based framework • Single Identity (i.e. one unified identity across all systems) and Single Sign On (i.e. login once and gain access to all portals) across all group sites like dotcom, support site etc. • Role based access to all resources. • Public and Private Work Spaces to support course development or any confidential projects • User Subscription, Course Subscription, Tutoring sessions with moderation support • Federated Search across all related sites and portals • Individual email accounts under customer domain name for all users enrolled on the system • Text, voice and video chat • Search Engine Optimizations Personalized Learning Spaces • Individualized learning spaces for all enrolled users enrolled providing an integrated view of all their activities. • Collaborative learning spaces for all users to jointly work on projects, content creation, learning exercises, etc • Rich set of tutoring, learning and practice tools supported in the learning spaces. Electronic Delivery • Course Execution page • Split classroom into groups • Store and Organize learning objects in a variety of ways based on learning modality • Moderated e-learning, Webinars, Speeches, Tutorials and Virtual Conferences Course Administration • Organization of users, lessons, quizzes and other content as desired • Project, sub project, users, user group, public and private identity, email and session Administration • Easy integration of new tools inside the learning management system • Extensible catalog fields • Moderated Subscription to all system services Just-In-Time Assessments • Workflow driven assessments • Multi-Dimensional Assessments o Multiple Formats, Open answer (Text) o Upload file o Fill the blank space • Teacher advice • Test Results o Exam Management o Test result table Virtual Class Rooms • Educators and Students can participate in classes with audio, video, whiteboard, application sharing, browser sharing and desktop sharing • Video of educator is visible during the entire session • Session moderated by educator • Students wishing to interact are also moderated by the educator • Interacting student's video is available for the educator Tagging • Easily tag content of interest with user and admin generated tags. Ratings • Ratings enable user feedback on every project and site asset. Karma • User Karma points can be converted to credits for onsite commerce. Discussion Groups • Support for any number of discussion groups based on technology, company, and region. Site and project level content management Theme Support • Theme and theme management for easy site branding and customization. Rich Content • Self service extensible Content Management System to manage content on Site and Project landing pages • WYSIWYG rich content editor for all tools, excluding tracker.

Access Controls • Single sign-on role-based access controls govern permissions and actions at the site, project, and tool levels. Unique Ecosystem Enablement for rapid community on-boarding Plugin/Project/Subproject Support • Projects and subprojects with a range of visibility, including private projects, gated projects, and public projects for multiple, customizable, project types, including core, accepted, incubated, language, and listing projects. Map Projects • Any project can be a fully-functional project automatically equipped with a suite of tools, or a listing project pointing to development assets located from a different site Loosely Couple External Tools and Artifacts • Incrementally migrate communities and sites to EssentiaESP Knowledge Creation • Directly upload SCORM compliant learning objects • Knowledge experts and content creators can create simple html, pdf, presentations, documents, spreadsheets, math equations, images and videos • Flash file generators can create flash files from any of the content created by the user Knowledge Standards • Support for SCORM objects. Check for SCORM compliant learning objects • Support for various modalities, like adaptive learning, immersive learning and experimental learning • Import and checking for regular and rich media content like flash, podcast, video, animation, 3-D, Virtual Worlds, etc • Support for all popular document, image, video, animation, 3-D, rich media file formats • Videos can be captured directly from the browser • Supports pre-requisites on learning objects Teaching Management • Course Management • Course catalog • Course home page • Course curriculum Communication Tools • IM/Chat/Voice Chat • Videoconference • Forum • Ideas, Issues, Task Management • Blogs • Mailing Lists • News • Pointed Messages • Survey/Polls • Newsletter KnowledgeBase • Pages are organized in a document repository and versioned • Topics • News archive • Images and Movie archive • Documents archive • Links archive • Content archive • Forums archives • Wiki pages of all publications • Searchable Knowledgebase Commerce Exchange • Shopping cart and dynamic cataloging • Tag based and Search Product Catalog • Pricing, Promotion & Collections Management • Supports all popular payment gateways • Buyer feedback captured, ranked, rated & reviewed Online Marketing • Banner Ad Server • Contact form building • Optimized for Google adwords • Omniture and Google Analytics Metrics, Reporting, Dashboards • Full fledged report server supports dashboards, ad-hoc reports, charts, drill downs etc • Powerful usage, user and traffic metrics • Dashboards and analytics on critical metrics • Reports by groups, workspaces • Report by learning object or user

World Class SAS Type-II Certied Production Environment:

• Essentia eKnow is delivered under a 'Application as a service' model through the establishment of a datacenter within the university campus that is equivalent to a SAS-70 Type II datacenter

• Essentia undertakes full responsibility for hardware, software, network and operations management including
responsibility for provisioning hardware and network, application installation, configuration, branding and
user experience customizations and testing the application using rigorous quality control processes in the data
center prior to giving access to customer

• Users only need access to a computer (desktop, laptop or a mobile device) with internet access to use eKnow.
A fully trained application support team is available to support the customer from initial trials through full
production.

Essentia was established in Feb 2007 by industry veterans with a charter to focus on online communities. Essentia
currently has over 160,000 users world wide. Essentia data centres in Santa Clara (California, USA) and Chennai
(India) are equipped to currently handle up to 300,000 students.

Essentia has recently been selected by Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai for its IT enablement and technology
commercialization initiatives. Essentia's Chennai based development organization has deep domain expertise in
Education technology delivery.