Not too long ago, the Asian Classics Institute developed and launched its online learning platform--an educational portal to enhance and personalize each of our student's experience in learning the ACI wisdom.

ACI's online learning platform was created to provide easy access to our course work as well as to support our students’ growth and development in their spiritual aspirations. It functions as the action arm of ACI to provide a rich array of information and content. The platform is the "My ACI" of a personalized student experience to guide students on their journey through the classical ancient wisdom

The Top Five Benefits:

It's efficient--everything's in one place
You can grade others’ course work or self-check your own
Expert volunteers provide operational and access support in ten languages
It's customized to support your spiritual endeavors
It connects you to essential wisdom

Where Did It Come From?

*Nikita Antonov, the manager for the ACI online learning platform*

In 2019, some generous and dedicated ACI students from Russia and Ukraine who had day jobs as programmers and developers made a decision, reports Nikita Antonov, who is responsible for overseeing platform activities at ACI. They said, "Let's create a place for students to accurately and easily collect homeworks, and have all student materials in one place." After exploring options, they decided to create a custom platform, because existing CRM (customer relationship management) programs and educational learning tools didn't have all the features they wanted. That's how the ACI online learning platform was born.

After the first version was released in the Russian language in 2020, these students approached the ACI home office in Sedona and asked if we would like to use the application in other languages served by ACI. Thanks to their generosity, we have since then expanded its capacity to 10 languages and we plan to add more in the very near future!

What Does It Do?

*Francisco Miranda works on managing platform activities*

"It really helps our students to pursue their completion of the 18 ACI Foundation Courses," said Francisco Miranda, who helps manage platform activities. "On the platform, students can register for courses, pay for enrichment packages, post their completed homeworks, quizzes, and final exams, and register to get their course completion certificates."

Before the advent of the platform, students would have to print out their homeworks and mail them to teachers to be corrected and registered as complete. As ACI's teachings spread more broadly across the world, this increasingly became a problem. "The community grew. We had thousands of students sending in homeworks to be corrected. We were dealing in multiple languages," says Francisco. "It got very complex to manage all these processes."

The platform helped change all that. "Now, people can go to our website, start an account on the platform, and they're off and running," Francisco tells us. "They can keep track of all the homeworks they complete, grade them, and eventually get their certificate of completion. It's really helpful and efficient."

Nikita comments, "We also collect user feedback on the platform. It helps us to improve. And we created a support system. Just activate "Ask a Question" in the sidebar, and you can send us your question to be answered."

Another thing the platform does for students is manage study groups within its environment. And it allows donations to ACI's various programs and campaigns. "This is important, as we can enable plug-ins and allow transactions to take place in people's own languages and currencies," Francisco tells us.

One useful feature of the platform is that it provides recordings of previous classes. If you miss a class, or you want to review one, you can access it through your account on the platform. Nikita says, "It's like a mini-version of The Knowledge Base, focused on ACI-centered teachings and events." Francisco adds, "Something really great is that if the course--for example ACI 1--is taught more than once, you can get both sets of class recordings on the learning platform."

Spreading Teachings Far and Wide

When Covid swept the world, it fundamentally changed the nature of ACI's operations and methods of teaching. People were no longer able to attend courses in person locally with live teachers. Everyone turned to Zoom. Many people found this less enjoyable than in-person teachings, but at least it enabled them to continue to study with certified ACI teachers. And overall, the effect of Zoom teachings was hugely positive: thousands of additional students came to ACI through the medium of Zoom. It was easier to take courses with Geshe Michael himself, such as Lam Rim, Nagarjuna, and Medicine Buddha teachings. It was easier to take ACI Foundation Courses with certified ACI teachers online. And the need for translation into multiple new languages exploded.

That's where the learning platform comes in. It has an almost-unique ability to allow us to function in multiple languages simultaneously. Nikita tells us, "Multi-language functionality at this level is rare. That's one of the main reasons we decided to custom create this tool, and not try to buy it off the shelf. Good options just didn't exist. We're very lucky to have such talented developers helping us."

"We're up to 12 languages now," says Francisco. "We recently added Italian and French. Some languages we are well established in, like Russian and Spanish. Others we are developing on an ongoing basis. It's very exciting!"

How Does It Work?

So how does the platform do this? Essentially, it's a collection of 12 different websites, one in each of ACI's languages. "It's still a bit old-fashioned," Francisco tells us. "I can't wait till version 2.0 comes out. But right now, it's necessary for the tech staff to log in to each language platform and change everything individually. This is why it sometimes takes us some time to upload class materials, and I want to thank all our students for their patience. My colleague, Nikita Antonov, is working hard on the new version. Everything will be in one place, and we will be able to update and upload everything from a central point. It will be much faster!"

Thank you, ACI Volunteers!

Francisco hastens to add, "It's not as if I do every change myself. We have an army of volunteers that do it. They are the keepers of the 12 different websites/platforms. My hat goes off to our amazing and wonderful volunteers! ACI could not reach all the people it does without their hard and constant work. We could not function. We could not feed the teaching to all the people who are hungry for it without them. ACI thanks them a million times!"

How Do I Use It?

So how do people use the learning platform, and how does one get into this magic door?

"Most users are on mobiles," says Francisco. "Maybe about 80% of our users access the platform on their phones. The second-largest mode is computers, and we have about 2% on TVs."

And how do you get on? "Go to the ACI website, and click the Study tab," instructs Francisco. "Then choose Study online>Registration. That will take you to a sign-up page. You'll get an email that asks you to confirm your email. That way you know your registration has been successful."

What's Next?

The platform is under constant development. "It's a big advance over what we had to do previously, with printing and mailing homework," said Francisco. "And we have many plans for improving it."

Every day, the platform is getting better. Nikita comments, "Soon we hope to put a page for every certified ACI teacher on the platform. It will be similar to Facebook. Students everywhere will be able to communicate directly with the teacher of their choice."

So please give it a try and tell us what you think: programs@asianclassicsinstitute.org

And definitely stayed tuned.
More surprises--good ones--are coming!

The Asian Classics Institute's Online Learning Platform