In use by nearly half a million users, the .LRN platform was orginally developed to support universities, and now we also use it with schools, businesses and non-profit organisations.
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MIT Sloan School of Management |
About MIT Sloan School of Management
MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the world's leading business schools, conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. One of the key ingredients in Sloan's continued success is its tight integration of teaching, research, and practice -- an integration that extends well beyond the boundaries of Sloan's students and faculty in Cambridge. Technology at Sloan also needs to extend beyond these boundaries, and to promote learning and innovation efficiently and cost effectively
Why MIT Sloan chose .LRN
When Sloan management was initially looking for collaborative education technology, their primary concern was the breadth of their requirements and the speed with which these requirements would evolve. Going with a commercial vendor or undertaking 100% custom development seemed prohibitively risky, especially given the universal reality of limited resources. According to Sloan CIO Alfred Essa, choosing a well-supported, open source solution mitigated these risks. "Open source provides not only the source code, but visibility into the development process and path," says Essa. ".LRN's global community of developers offers support for existing .LRN users, as well as a proven, secure system for delivering enhancements back into the code base."
What MIT Sloan is doing with .LRN
Sloan runs all its classes and clubs on .LRN, serving over eleven thousand users with three thousand unique logins each day. And .LRN has exceeded Sloan's expectations as a cost-effective solution. According to Essa, "Over five years, we?ve spent roughly $500,000 to deploy, extend, and maintain .LRN. Our benchmarking suggests we?ve spent roughly 25% of the cost of similar systems built with commercial software or custom homegrown code." Sloan is channeling its savings into innovations customized to meet student and faculty needs. For example, Sloan is using .LRN for implementing advanced simulations, like a financial instrument trading game, and a class notes-style application using weblogs and RSS, which are part of .LRN.
Future plans for .LRN at MIT Sloan
With the recent upgrade to .LRN 2.1, Sloan is focused on deploying a number of this version's productivity enhancers, like WebDAV for drag-and-drop file management. .LRN's flexibility guarantees a long wishlist from Sloan's sophisticated user base. Upcoming projects include taking advantage of .LRN's IMS/SCORM support to leverage MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) content. Running OCW's open source content through .LRN's open source technology illustrates the potential collaboration and educational innovation made possible by .LRN at Sloan.
