Extreme Learning Process

What is XLP?

XLP stands for Extreme Learning Process, a methodology that lets communities of learners design and conduct collaborative learning activities. Taking a look more closely at the name:

• Extreme: XLP explores frontiers, identifies boundaries, and helps participants push those boundaries.
• Learning: XLP enables individual learning, group learning, and large-scale crowd learning.
• Process: XLP has a explicit process, through which participants prepare, deploy, and execute missions.

We aim to become a crowd-learning system that facilitates collective learning in this increasingly complex world. Learners are empowered to work together within and between teams, and incorporate both digital and physical elements.

Due to advancing technology, educational institutions can now operate in ways unthinkable only a few years ago. This is because today it is possible to collect and process organizational behavior data in ways that were impossible before. Therefore XLP is not merely about improving individual learning, but also measuring and improving organizational learning.

XLP in a Nutshell

XLP is a digital publishing workflow with inputs, outputs, processes, measured by Contextualized goals in terms of desirable effects. The overall workflow dynamics is governed by Logic Models, which are recursively composed of other Logic Models stored in a common digital repository. :

A short introduction to XLP in Powerpoint format :A short introduction to XLP in Powerpoint format.

Inputs

• Sponsors and groups of participants, who become mission designers and mission executors. These participants come together for a specific learning objective and duration.
• Resources such as hackerspaces, campuses, mentoring, etc.

Activities

• Mission based learning, which is designed and executed by groups of participants. Each mission uses gamified techniques to impart valuable knowledge and skills with real-world applications.
• Digital publishing of all activities and results, in the form of containers of knowledge.

Outputs

• Containers of knowledge, carrying a full record of participant activity, and able to be read, shared and deployed with ease
• Knowledge and skills transfer
• Credentials and qualifications, stored on the Blockchain. Access can be granted to selected employers and institutions to prove participants expertise.
• Crowd Learning, i.e. large scale collaboration on learning missions.

Desirable Effects

For participants:

• Real world decisions: XLP challenges participants to make financial, legal, cultural and technical decisions, so they can achieve goals set by the participant groups themselves.
• Real world experience: XLP is pragmatic. The XLP method induces realistic human dynamics, utilizes modern technologies, encourages participants to create social norms, and establishes executable regulations based on the design principles of the fast-evolving Internet.
• Tapping potential: XLP drives participants to realize their untapped potentials and emerging powers of collaboration through having them stretch the educational envelope by shifting the focus from teaching (top-down) to learning (bottom-up).

For educators and institutions:

• No-one left behind: XLP encourages an evolutionary process, which creates a digitally enabled learning context that delivers rich social-interactions and leaves no-one behind.
• Curating, not teaching: By placing participants in control of learning, XLP redefines educators' roles as curators of learning resources and as evaluators of participants' learning-potentials.
• Deeper, richer data: XLP provides network-enabled learning data management technology that enables stakeholders to record, analyze and identify learning trajectories to define new directions for progress.

A Short History of XLP

Since June 2012, XLP-based orientation programs and semester-long courses have been conducted at:

• Tsinghua University, list of courses, Beijing
• National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
• Singapore University of Technology and Design
• Taylor's University, Malaysia
• Eurasia University, Xi'an
• Tianjin Vocational College of Mechanics and Electricity
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New Engineering Education Transformation Initiative

Courses have also been conducted at many leading high schools in China. Due to XLP's experimental success, China's Ministry of Education has invited the founder of XLP to serve on the Design Committee of National Curriculum Standards on Technology Education, with the goal of rolling out XLP as a learning architecture and a learning activity design methodology for over 300 million registered students in the Chinese education system.

How XLP Works

Please see XLP Operating Manual.