I’m getting so proud when I see ADL SCORM Certification of SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK), congratulation! for your great works, SLK’s team members.
Here you can see some snapshots from my old experiences, before the birth of SharePoint, and taking all my time and energy working on it since 2002.
I had an idea a couple of years ago about using SharePoint technology as a platform for a comprehensive e-learning solution, but I has no ready customer to investigation on it, and now I’m so excited to see an open source project at Microsoft, based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 for developing an Learning Management System (LMS).
Using SharePoint Learning Kit 1.0, you can store and manage your e-learning courses based on SCORM 2004 2nd edition and IMS+ standards, on SharePoint document libraries. It also supports learner-centric and instructor-led (assigned) workflows, allowing assignment, tracking and grading both e-learning and non e-learning contents.
As you know there is 5 main components for a complete e-learning solution.
1) Learning Management System or LMS/LCMS, you can use SLK, and no other products can be much better, because we are using great functionality and facilities of SharePoint in the bed. Also you can easily customize it with your other requirements and applications especially using Workflow Foundation as a platform.
2) Assessment tools, a bit manipulating of survey lists in SharePoint plus assignment and tracking features of SLK and WSS will be completely support our requirements for assessment tools.
3) Authoring tools, I have no solution for this part, but I can suggest Macromedia Authorware and it’s more powerful content authoring I ever seen. It receives AICC compliance certificate. Also, once upon in time on the Microsoft web site, there was a useful authoring tools by the name: LRN Toolkit 3.0, but it seems completely faded from the earth! If you hear any voice of it, please ping me a note, This is a course based on it .
4) Virtual Class, you can use Microsoft Live Meeting, and as you know it’s integrated with SharePoint and we have some web parts for accessing your meeting from SharePoint sites.
5) Communication & Collaboration tools, using Microsoft Live Communication will be a perfect solution for real time communication (RTC) including text, voice, video, shared whiteboard, application sharing and so on. especially you can customize it’s client, Office Communicator for your university or company needs, and so fantastic, you can use an AJAX client Office Communicator web access, zero installation and configuration on the client side, just a web browser! Also, about collaboration, I know exactly, no better solution than SharePoint 2007.
As you can see, we have a comprehensive, complete, fantastic solution for implementing e-learning. Any rich lucky customer?