Providing constituents with campus information and services on demand through the latest mobile technology is now a requirement for higher education institutions. With direct access to the Internet portal and the e-Racer learning management system, JICS Go offers a rich online experience for users to view campus news and events, class communications, and general coursework from mobile devices anywhere, at any time. JICS Go was developed with an online interface designed specifically for mobile phones such as the Apple® iPhone® mobile device, Google Android™ mobile device, Blackberry® smartphone, and popular tablets including the iPad® mobile device.

“Higher education institutions are looking beyond typical online capabilities and Internet services to communicate and connect with students. They are seeking to provide campus technology, learning functionality, and other digital content to users through mobile devices,” said Robert A. Maginn, Jr., Jenzabar Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “JICS Go will not only help institutions connect with their constituents, much like typical websites or other online outlets, the interface of the mobile solution will improve user engagement to help drive student success and retention.”

Jenzabar’s Internet Campus Solution is an Internet portal that connects candidates, students, alumni, faculty, and staff to an institution’s database at any time from any Internet browser, giving constituents 24×7 access to role-specific content, from administrative records and reports to online exams and chat rooms. E-Racer is a learning management system developed to help faculty, students, and administrators stay up to speed with the demands of a dynamic educational environment. Student information found in JICS and e-Racer is accessible through JICS Go.

iPhone and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Android is a trademark of Google Inc. Use of this trademark is subject to Google Permissions. BlackBerry is a registered trademark of Research In Motion Limited.

Source: Jenzabar.com

Wikipedia’s definition is concise
LMSs range from systems for managing training and educational records, to software for distributing courses over the Internet with features for online collaboration. Corporate training uses LMSs to automate record-keeping and employee registration. Student self-service (e.g., self-registration on instructor-led training), training workflow (e.g., user notification, manager approval, wait-list management), the provision of on-line learning (e.g., Computer-Based Training, read & understand), on-line assessment, management of continuous professional education (CPE), collaborative learning (e.g., application sharing, discussion threads), and training resource management (e.g., instructors, facilities, equipment), are dimensions to Learning Management Systems.

Criteria for Choosing an LMS
Many large companies have their own LMS system and many small training providers don’t need one at all. I should say here that because an LMS is not “needed” in order to begin offering e-learning and because they are generally quite costly, they are somewhat outside the scope of my goals, as stated at the outset of this article. However, in the interest of understanding the full scope e-learning, I’ll share these few brief notes.

If you’re looking to differentiate among the many LMS providers, you’ll probably want to consider price, service, ease of use, number of users and/or learners it accommodates, whether you host on your own server or the provider’s, inclusion of course authoring software, inclusion of conferencing software, ability to work with other software you have, and general sophistication of the system.

Vendor Options
As I said, many LMS systems are quite costly. Of the few I list here, some look like a pretty good value for trainers who can’t afford a large, robust system; others are providers whose names came up most frequently over the course of my research. Because this was outside of my scope, the notes are a bit more scant.

Moodle
Moodle is a free and open source LMS. Some say Moodle is quite cumbersome—but it’s free! Some LMS vendors work off the Moodle platform and enhance it, giving users a low-cost solution but with better service, such as the two listed below:

Pricing
Free
Vendor-enhanced option: EasyCampus by Educadium
$29 per month
Based on Moodle, EasyCampus includes course templates and wizards; enrollment and reporting tools; social networking tools; payment services; etc. The Professional version features unlimited courses, 500 user accounts, and 2 GB storage.
Vendor-enhanced option: Remote-Learner
Remote Learner advances the capabilities of Moodle and offers support.
$795 per year for the entry-level package, called Sandbox.

Odijoo
Odijoo lets you develop and post online courses for free, and takes as its fee 10 percent of your revenue income.
Odijoo’s service includes a tool to create courses online or import Articulate courses, which you can conduct as facilitated or self-paced courses.

Pricing
10 percent of the revenue you take in from charging for courses (paid monthly)

Atlantic Link
Atlantic Link offers the whole package: an LMS plus rapid e-learning software. Based in the U.K., Atlantic Link has been in the U.S. since 2007. Its platform enables concurrent developing (two users can give feedback at once). It also lets you record and edit audio, and it works with Captivate and Camtasia. A host of fun interactive activities are built into the software.

Pricing
$2,700 + $6,000 + 18 percent update fee for the Perpetual package
$3,300 per year for the hosted LMS version

Course-Mill by Trivantis
Course-Mill is an affordable, lower end LMS for unlimited users.

Pricing
$14,995 (software)
$7,500 setup + monthly fee for the hosted solution

Source: eLearn Magazine

IDLE is a free, open source interactive learning environment developed for academic use. It supports arbitrary interaction within distributed learning communities and facilitates both students and teachers through courses and make it more practical.

IDLE’s goal is to make the learning environment as interactive as possible so that both students and teachers can benefit when using it, and bring to the web an approximation of the interactivity we experience in everyday life as well as providing better classroom environment in exercise session and group work. Teachers can use IDLE, for instance, to put exercises, guidelines for the exercises, and the required materials for learning, as well as hold exercise sessions in classroom environment and grade students.  Students can, for example, signup to the courses and their exercise groups, perform the exercises and get guidance on them, as well as upload their answers in the system and see the the results when they are published.

IDLE provides a range of services that are necessary for a course, including:

• Signing up for the course and exercise sessions
• Lecture, exercise, and other material, including learning videos
• Interactive exercises, both online and offline
• Forming static or dynamic student groups
• Booking times for review sessions
• Grading the exercises for individual students or student groups
• Integrated Wiki, discussion groups, mailing facilities, etc.

IDLE provides a special feature called classroom environment. This is a set of functionality that is used for forming a special kind of enhanced learning.

During an exercise session the teacher can open the classroom environment and students can join into it. Several students can log into the same IDLE session and form a dynamic group. In dynamic group everything will be saved for the whole group and can be viewed by the whole group later on. In these dynamic groups the students can not only learn from the teacher but from each other.

After the creation of the groups, the list of groups and their members are visible to the teacher. So the teacher will be able to see which group is performing what task. It gives the teacher flexibility to evaluate the students during the session, and help them if needed. Student’s answers can be shown on the video projector at any time, where it can be discussed and corrected if necessary.

Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed learning assisted mechanisms aids learners by speeding up their learning abilities and help their learning performance!

IDLE was developed by the the department of software systems at Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in Finland. IDLE program is free software: it can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Affero GNU Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Operating Systems:  Windows   Unix   Linux   Mac OS X

Implementation:  PHP 5  CSS   JavaScript   

Translations:  English   Finnish     French

Download IDLE from sourceforge (find documentation, bug/feature tracking, forums, …)

 http://www.cs.tut.fi/~idle/download.html

The Dell Learning System is a total e-Learning solution, which provides the basic computer skills training your teachers need, plus it can be customized with your own professional development content. Each Dell Learning System comes with a Dell PowerEdge^TM 2950 loaded with the training content and the learning management system. And because the Dell Learning System resides behind your firewall, you can virtually eliminate direct, external security threats and help protect your sensitive information.

The training package is divided into two modules:

PC & Desktop Application Courses –
Helps enhance staff productivity as students learn to make the most of their desktop technology. Features training on Microsoft^® Office^® , Adobe, Corel WordPerfect, Intuit, PC Basics and Novell^® GroupWise.

IT Training and Certification Courses –
Focused on managing an IT infrastructure. IT Professionals have access to training on popular certifications, such as Microsoft Certified Systems (MCSE & MCST), Cisco, Linux (LPI), Oracle, Java and CompTIA^® .

You may wish to watch this 2-minute video on how the Dell Learning System can make training easy to implement and easy to manage.