Educational institutions are constantly battling the strain between their two most important, competing objectives- how to improve the educational process, while reducing costs. On the one hand, there is the need for improved student, teacher interaction. On the other hand, budget constraints have forced student to teacher ratios to the level where a student is lucky to get more than a few minuets of individual attention a day. More than ever before students are left feeling alone, isolated and on their own to find their way through the learning process.

The challenge for all teachers is to find a way to pull their students together, improve their learning experience, and create a community-learning environment. All this with a shoestring budget, limited outside support and no big changes likely any time soon. iMrkr can help.

iMrkr community tools provide the community communications platform teachers so desperately need while offering options to the budget constraints all educational institutions are facing. iMrkr's solution gives students a multiple profile system to communicate with their teachers and fellow students they way the need- some things for everyone, some things privately. Students can share homework assignments, reading materials, subject matter discussions and curriculum schedules with teachers and classmates while sharing more of their personal lives with friends with no fear of the two colliding. Beginning with a master profile, students manage all of their communications in one place. After that, it's just a matter of selecting who they want to see what; homework and discussions with their classmates, pictures from the weekend with friends and family. If a student needs extra help, they can contact their teachers, fellow students or even tutor groups, discreetly, on their own terms at their own pace, to get the help they need. Teachers can give the students the attention they need, beyond the boundaries of the schoolroom or the class schedule.

Once everyone is on-line and working together, this is where iMrkr really shines. Student groups, athletic departments, the entire educational institution can begin to drive revenue back into the academic process with any number of iMrkrs Community Monetization Tools. Schools can sell banner ads, storefronts, even micro communities to area business. A classified ad system lets students buy and sell books, dorm wears even used cars, all while passing along extra funds to the school. Entire marketing campaigns created to drive entirely new streams of revenue, once unimaginable. Read on to learn more about how iMrkr can help your School make the changes it needs to achieve its goals.

Summary:

• After the successful implementation of an iMrkr community network for the International Computer Science and Technology Conference (ICSTC) at National University (the oldest continuously operating IT professional organization in San Diego). National University turned its sights on implementing a University wide community network to improve student / faculty interaction.
• Based on the success of the ICSTC conference community, it was hoped that a larger University wide community might be established which would include the technology community, and also the greater student body as a whole. As part of the community development effort, the administration hoped to create a safe environment for students to explore, collaborate and learn, not just about their course work, but also about social media in general without the risks so prevalent in many of today's social media tools.
• Creating a safe online community for students to share course information, topical discussions and peer review forums with both students and faculty was priority number one for the universities. A close second was the creation of a community network where students could feel free to share their lives with one another with out the risks so prevalent in other social media tools.

Challenge: Increasing student participation with academic pursuits, develop a secured faculty / student community for safe community interactions.

In choosing iMrkr as the service provider for it's community portal for a recent technology conference (ICSTC), National University realized they had stumbled onto a much broader solution than they originally recognized. Their original goal was simple enough, create a space where presentation materials could be housed, provide presenters and attendees with personal profiles from which to connect and communicate with one another, present the conference schedule of events. Once implemented however, National University quickly realized that iMrkr's tools were capable of much more than originally anticipated.

"For quite some time, National University had been looking for a solution which would allow its students and faculty to engage in the free exchange of ideas with out the risks so prevalent in many of today's social media tools" noted the Dean of Students. The issues were clear enough, how does a university sanction a tool which has so many potential pitfalls. The last thing anyone wanted was to see anyone hurt by the abuse of a tool the university spent resources to implement. National University needed to find a safer, more effective tool before they would be comfortable rolling it out for use by their faculty and students.

Solution: Your iMrkr, Your iMrkr Powered Site & Community Lite implementations.

After the success of the ICSTC conference, and the realization that iMrkr's tools had a much broader application than originally anticipated National University sat down with iMrkr to discuss what might be done to fully harness the full breadth of iMrkr's technologies.

Paul Gisiano noted, "…once we had our [ICSTC] site up and running it became apparent that we were just scratching the surface. Where the profile management system gave ICSTC the security it needed, the community Lite solution promised even more dynamic communications than we could have hoped for. I immediately began to work through the viral expansion loops which might be possible with a more enterprise level implementation. We couldn't help but realize that this would be of value to the students, the faculty and the university, as a whole from not just from the social but also from financial perspective as well"

Viral expansion loops, as Paul observed, are the tipping points at which a community's dynamics take hold in such a way as to be self perpetuating, creating ever greater connections and opportunities as they grow. Said another way, at a specific point in community growth curve, the shear size and activity of the community becomes self sustaining, growing in directions not originally planned for. What this meant in layman's terms was improved student teacher interactions coupled with new sources of revenue for the university!

The original intent of the enterprise implementation was rather straight forward. Build a safe environment where students and faculty could use iMrkr's multiple profile capabilities to communicate with one another while maintaining separate communication channels for use within other groups. So a student might maintain an academic profile for class work and a personal profile for communications with friends. Similarly, faculty might maintain classroom profiles for communications with students while maintaining a faculty profile for sharing with others on staff. It was always imagined that these profiles might grow beyond one or two, to perhaps dozens as students recognized the value of keeping a greater number of profiles; from the class level or per semester or even for family and friends outside the university. What was not immediately understood was the implications of what would happen when students themselves could create their own ‘sub communities'.

The implications of that double viral loop growth appear to be the biggest for marketing and sales professionals. For example, as the first dorm based community grows to include flag football teams who loved to stop by Servano's pizza after a game, the monetization opportunities flourish. Suddenly, many business in San Diego will want a way to connect with a highly motivated, highly concentrated consumer base. Retailers and service providers alike clamor for space on the newly growing community. Later larger sponsors may come calling: Apple may target the film and music schools, BMW the finance crowd… before the university realizes what is happening, they could be making more money from the monetization of their community than they are from many other ‘tried and a true' revenue sources.

Features:

• Multiple Secured Profiles
• Custom iMrkrs
• User Event calendar
• Profile based Multi media publishing
• Individual Blogs
• Community Classifieds
• Business Listings
• Storefronts

Benefits:

• Intelligent networking: share what you want with who you want to have it.
• Personal web content management and distribution.
• Personal promotion tool.
• The ideal middle ground to contact and connect with others.
• Create micro community portals for classes, clubs, and businesses.
• The ability to completely personalize what is shared with others.
• Lowers the risks associated with social interactions.
• Increases the more interested party’s chance of starting a dialogue.
• The physical iMrkr itself can be used to make a statement, or portray a certain image.
• On-line profile aggregation.