Low Cost Tools for eLearning

At the AG09 conference, there was a lot of discussion about using social websites, and putting them in a corporation to capture knowledge. This article list some software for building social community types of sites. So if you are wanting to build a social aspect into your company, this might be a good place to look.

Many in the list are free, which is great.  Unfortunately, it does come at a slight cost – that is a loss of some functionality. That functionality is usually in the form of not integrating with your Active Directory so you can have automatic logins. You also might benefit from someone who knows how to set it up, configure, and brand it to look the way you would want it to.

In many of the sessions, people talked about using something like Share Point from Microsoft. While a good application, it is expensive. However, it does give you the the ability to automatically login. It also has lots of features, which might be expensive to add-on, and/or learn to use. However, you can find classes to take on-line and at training centers.

The list is a bit old, unfortunately, which means some of the software projects are not supported, and there are some new projects out there. I have noticed that 1024 is no longer in active development. I am currently looking into BitWeaver from this site however for a web site I am developing. One thing I like about it is that you can add on features as you might like to increase it’s functionality.

One application not listed in the article was Buddy Press.  Built on the same foundation as Word Press (which powers this blog), and by the same people. I’ve heard of several people who like it.

I plan to start implementing Bit Weaver in a little bit. I will follow up with what I found out about it when I complete the project.

This website is built as a blog, powered by WordPress. For those who attended some of the Web 2.0 type classes, at AG09, you know that blogs are one way in which “Experts” in your company can easily distribute information to other people.

WordPress, allows additional features, such as adding themes, and plug-ins (like the review feature) – so that others can be involved in the discussion.

The Pros

WordPress has several nice features to it such as:

• easy install – 5 minutes or less usually,
• lots of free, or nearly free, plug-ins to extend its usability,
• it is actively being developed – continuous updates, new features, and security updates,
• easy article/post editor, and
• it’s free.

The Cons

• Helpful to install on a linux server (although it can be hosted on Windows or remotely though wordpress.com),
• it is actively being developed – which means you have to update periodically, and
• it uses PHP4 (means that it not as current, but it can run on almost any server because of this.

Overall

Overall, WordPress is a simple, but powerful blogging platform which can allow people to easily communicate news, information, etc without having to be technically minded. It can even be set up to run with multiple authors if you’d like.

It is fast, and allows for advanced features if you choose to enable them, working equally well in front of, as well as behind a firewall if necessary. Definately something worth looking into if you want to start with some basic elearning 2.0 without having a large budget.