The Electronic Learning Community (or the ELC) is a web based community application designed specifically to serve educators. The application is used in conjunction with JHU's MAT and continuing education classes to create and maintain asynchronous, geographically independent communities of practice.

The ELC functions both as a collaborative tool and a course delivery platform. An online course deployed on the ELC consists of group and individual activities, discussion forums, moderated chats, and resource sharing. The model used for the ELC allows courses to be inserted into online communities giving participants access to the body of knowledge that has accumulated within the course's associated community and therefore strengthening it as it matures.

no|inc's role in this project was to design a user friendly interface that went beyond the accessibility standards of Section 508 and would support web XHTML standards while ensuring a satisfactory performance with popular screen readers for the blind. The ELC interface also needed to give educators a sense of place while affording them a vast range of interaction with experts in their field through a hierarchical, topic based navigation.

The core areas that make up the ELC are: Announcements, Calendar, Chat, Discussion, and Resources. Some of the features are:

• Admin, manager, instructor, member/student permission levels
• Ability to filter content by "Themes" (topics and areas of interest)
• Announcements
• Multi-user calendar
• Discussion forums
• Web based moderated chat tool
• Web based instant messaging tool
• Shared folder-based filing cabinet
• Community management tools
• Customized interface capability