Dissecting a Network-Based Education System

The Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX; www.alex.state.al.us) is a network-based education system designed and implemented to help improve education in Alabama. It accomplishes this goal by providing a single location for the state's K-12 educators to find information that will help improve their classroom effectiveness. The ALEX system includes courses of study, content standards, lesson plans, Web resources, listservs, a bulletin board, and other educational resources. ALEX was patterned after the Georgia Learning Connections education Web portal (www.glc.k12.ga.us) and input received at a SouthEast Initiatives Regional Technology in Education Consortium (SEIR*TEC) Academy. At the time, there was a significant need for a Web site that could provide teachers with a way to access teaching guidelines, search them, and find lesson plans that could assist in the teaching of those guidelines. ALEX provides this central location for educators to find teaching resources and collaborate with statewide counterparts. Before the deployment of ALEX, most teachers had to share one book of content standards for each course of study. This new education portal makes accessing the content standards much more convenient for teachers. This article describes the system architecture and configuration of ALEX, and includes recommendations for future improvements to the system.