In 2008, Professors Ananda Gunawardena a Computer Scientist, and David Kaufer, a humanist, teamed up to build a platform to understand how students engage with course documents and videos, both individually and socially. The work was based on years on research on text analysis, machnine learning, learning sciences and human computer interaction research. The goal of the platform was to enable interaction in the context of documents and videos using annotations. The platform then aggregates, analyze and present visualizations of user annotations to understand "hotspots" of content that then becomes the focus on conversations and learning. It is an ideal platform to use for flipped education.

Salon is used by over tens of thousands of invitation only teachers and students all over the world. The tool is used in many ways that was never imagined in 2008. That is the innovation in Salon.

Integrating Salon to your course is easy. You create a salon, add members, post documents and videos, and invite members to annotate content. You can even email or embed salon activity links in your webpage. Salon aggregates all annotations into density and semantic "hotspots". There is no reason to wonder if students read the material before/in/after class. Salon gives you analytics like no other. You will know which students are doing the work, where students are having trouble, what topics to cover in class etc. Salon is also an amazing communication tool. Students ask questions about material in its context. Since you have the option of keeping salon transparent, you or other students can respond to questions. There is no need search for an answer or wonder what the question is all about. It is all there in the context. Salon is discipline independent. Salon's ability to track learner analytics like no other tool makes it an easy choice for thousands of instructors. If you are in education or training, K-12, higher education, or even corporate training, you need classroom salon. Embed/integrate salon activity links to your existing course environment.

Email classroom-salon@andrew.cmu.edu for a free instructor or student registration code. It is easy to adopt but yet very powerful