Self-Organizing Learning Environments (SOLE)

SOLE is a great idea introduced by Sugata Mitra in late 90’s. Students learn more by organizing them around a concepts or document they like. Classroom Salon (http://classroomsalon.com) is built to enable these learning groups. Here is how it works.

Step 1: Students become members of a salon

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Step 2: They choose others who can be in their network.

In the above case, student (Markus) has selected two others to be in his network.

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Step 3: Students can filter comments from their network to perform more focused discussions on documents or videos (video is shown below)

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Benefits of SOLE’s

SOLE’s provide an excellent way for you to conduct your classes. They can be immensely helpful in flipped classes where you can ask students to choose who should be in their network. Classroom Salon analytics also provide a way for instructors to know the students who are thought leaders (chosen by many to be in their network) and allow instructors to organize their classes accordingly.

Research

We continue to conduct research to understand how to recommend students to find the best people they can collaborate with. With tone and semantic analysis, we have made some great strides in understanding these groups. Here is a research from Princeton University.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/princeton/brandon_2014.pdf