Open Source Learning Management System LMS Tools For Online Education

A learning management system (LMS) is software tools for delivering, tracking and managing training/education, providing greater opportunities for control and customization of course content.

Online Learning is becoming popular these days, one of the best solution for students who want to gain higher education at their own convienience. Distance Learning Programs has become the preferred mode of learning for many all around the world.

For Students
Online homework help sites have become extremely useful in aiding students complete their school assignments.

For Working Professionals
Online Master’s degree programs are offered in a variety of program courses.

The choices are plenty when it comes to choosing a career course online. Both students and working professionals can apply for online degrees to enhance their career prospects.

Online Teaching and Learning Programs are designed to help working individuals get the skills and education they need without having the restrictions of a traditional class schedule which provide them with a better salary and benefits.

Choosing a Learning Management System (LMS) is a difficult decision, selecting the wrong LMS can have terrible financial repercussions and hurt the quality of your learning initiatives.

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

• Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
• Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
• Many of our users love to use the many activity modules (such as Forums, Wikis, Databases and so on) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It’s also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course. Anyone who uses Moodle is a Moodler.

LMS Features:

• Manage users, roles, courses, instructors, and facilities and generate reports
• Course calendar
• Learning Path
• Student messaging and notifications
• Assessment/testing capable of handling student pre/post testing
• Display scores and transcripts
• Grading of coursework and roster processing, including waitlisting
• Web-based or blended course delivery

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Micro-blogging is a term used for posting brief text updates to a blog, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group, particularly by using instant messaging software or a cell phone. Twitter is the best-known microblogging tool, but facebook’s status updates have similar features.

The space is hot and it’s still heating up.

Twitter is undoubtedly becoming one of the fastest growing social media tools in existence. As it continues to expand, so too does the diversity of its user base.

On Twitter, you will find:

• Memes, games, and activities
• A company, product, or brand
• Suspended accounts
• Guy in a suit, corporate background, with more following than followers
• Default avatar: means 3 things… spam, n00b, or something else
• Entertainers, athletes, and otherwise famous people
• News sources
• Characters, personalities, and unusual entities
• The rest of us

Twitter just launched “Verified Account” ^beta

To prevent identity confusion, Twitter is experimenting (beta testing) with a ‘Verified Account’ feature.

Like any other Internet tool, microblogging can be utilized for a number of purposes. While many are social, more pragmatic uses including business applications, also apply.

Teens can use microblogging as a social service to see what their friends are up to, scout out parties, or to simply stay linked for the fun of it while engaging in every day activities like school, shopping and studies. Student officers might also create microblogs for class committees to keep abreast of progress on project assignments.

It’s not only students who can benefit from this modernized, improved version of the telephone tree. Faculty might also find uses for microblogging. For example, when preparing for performances, band and drama teachers could use microblogs to network participating students for improved organizational efficiency. The quick nature of microblogs makes it a good management tool when the success of a project relies on many different people pulling together in a timely fashion.

Businesses can also use this tool for gathering and disseminating bullet-type information to the right parties, such as from a sales conference or client meeting. Court reporters can use microblogging to relay updates to producers and anchors in one fell swoop, and politicians can keep in touch with staff. Tour staff such as roadies, sound engineers and drivers could all benefit from being connected via a microblog that would keep everyone with the tour abreast of problems as they arise and resources at hand. By using a microblog one hand always knows what the other is doing.

Another use of microblogging involves boosting site traffic. A popular website blogger might announce updates or teasers to his or her blog through a microblog. An embedded link can take readers directly to the site.

While many question the need for yet another way to stay connected, over 100 microblog services reportedly exist as of Spring 2008, with the trend headed upward.