Getting your eLearning and KM tools for free (almost)

Cesar Brea recently introduced me to an open source elearning and KM tool - .LRN - first developed at MIT and now used by a number of educational institutions, as well as non-profit and for-profit organizations. It supports the integration of learning and KM through a suite of tools that include a portal, course management, learning management, on-line communities, and content management. Included in the features is support for blogs with full RSS capability, blogger API support, and formatted text entry. The learning and KM tools are built on Open ACS or Open Architecture Community System used in Siemens knowledge management application, Sharenet. Cesar serves on the executive board for .LRN and he describes a number of successful applications in a recent blog. While this takes out some important costs of doing KM and elearning, I feel obligated to add that if over half the cost of a KM or elearning implementation is spent on tools, the project is doomed to failure. With this disclaimer, .LRN offers a useful alternative to spending money for a significant portion of implementation costs, especially for educational institutions and it has some great features at any price. Here is a link to the .LRN Forum within the Open ACS Community which lists 7541 members.