Wright Selecting an Open-Source Online Course Development and Delivery Platform: An Academic Perspective Clayton R. These systems can incorporate a wide variety of materials, including text and multimedia resources such as learning objects obtained from sources such as MERLOT. WHAT ARE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE ? Open-source software is based on the following premise: “When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. Wright Clayton R. 16, no. MORE >>

Home > Gartner: E-learning Market Pushing Toward Open Source. Gartner: E-learning Market Pushing Toward Open Source. With open source products maturing, Blackboards ongoing lawsuit with Desire2Learn, and more and more functions linked to learning management systems, it can be a tough time for institutions to standardize on an e-learning platform. Sometimes the expectation is that its Sakai, but really, the surprise growth area in open source has been adoption of Moodle. The open source part of it isnt really the issue. Green. MORE >>

With eFront’s recent string of awards , I thought it was about time I took a look at this relative newcomer to the open source Learning Management System market. For many years, Moodle has been most people’s port of call when looking for an open source LMS (or Virtual Learning Environment in the education sector). By comparison, eFront’s user interface is a delight. By comparison, eFront has a simple set of permissions, which are based on the three apparently unchangeable base user types of administrator, professor and student. Don’t make me think. MORE >>

Be sure to do additional research and comparison with similar products prior to making a selection as this is just a small sampling. Dimdim has an open source version so developers can integrate it with other software. It  also integrates with a few open source eLearning tools. It’s a free and open source application with templates and plugins for enhancements. If you’re looking for a completely free and open source Wiki for a large installation, check out MediaWiki , which is the downloadable software that supports Wikipedia. MORE >>

One of these was: "We'll see more online rapid e-learning authoring environments come on the market, perhaps even open source." By comparison, Unison and RapideL-i have different feature sets and very different routes to market, but they join their predecessors in providing the most essential benefits of online authoring, not least easy collaboration amongst those working on the development team. On January 3rd I laid out my e-learning predictions for 2008. I'm optimistic that competition will provide customers with better products at ever more achievable prices. MORE >>