Open Source in the

Learning Enterprise

WHITEPAPER

Concept Paper – Open Source in the Learning Enterprise

www.tarams.com

Situation

As education and training becomes more

critical to success, organizations are

struggling to find the right blend of people,

protocols, and systems to manage their

learning programs. Technological

innovations are forcing organizations to

change their operations and services to fit

the needs of their customers. Strong

product knowledge is needed to cope

with the rapidly changing business

landscape.

Many organizations (banks,

pharmaceuticals, mobile phone companies

etc.) have field sales representatives who

are geographically distributed. Training

these representatives on the organization's

products, services and selling skills is

essential to such organizations. These

institutions typically tackle the training

requirements through traditional

classroom based delivery models for their

field representatives.

Problem

The core of any organization’s training

strategy revolves around solutions that

are –

Cost effective

Easy to track learner’s progress

Consistent and standardized

training

Traditional classroom based delivery models

fail to address these basic requirements, as

shown in Table 1.0.

Consistency - Traditional methods often

require the same curriculum to be taught over

and over again. Unless the instructor is the same

each time, there could be gaps in the consistency

of the message.

Time Reduction – When you require

employees to attend trainings, you are using

organization resources. That means it could cost

you more than just the initial investment for

materials ad curriculum.

Customization - In a traditional classroom

setting, you may not have the time you need to

slow down to cover new concepts or speed up

to get past familiar material.

Tracking and Management - In a more

traditional training session, you really have no

idea how effectively your message is being

received – some learners are motivated while

others are not.

Table 1.0

Without proper training, field

representatives struggle with understanding

the customers’ specific needs. This, in turn,

adversely affects their ability to map the right

products/services onto the customer’s

needs.

Concept Paper – Open Source in the Learning Enterprise

www.tarams.com

Benefits of Open Source LMS

Ease of customization - Since its open

source, it can be easily accessed and modified

to meet specific organizational needs

Extensibility through 3rd party add-ons

Ease of localization - The open-source

nature allows for modification for use in

languages that most commercial vendors would

ignore

Flexibility to host, customize, develop, and

obtain services and support from a variety of

vendors

No licensing costs, leaving more budgets for

system tailoring

Faster bug fixes, new version releases,

security patch releases, and feature upgrades.

Solution

e-Learning platforms address the challenges of

classroom based delivery models. They can be

beneficial for various reasons; including saving

on travel costs, meeting the training needs at

a more appropriate time, and avoiding having

to replace employees during work hours. It

also allows for a faster distribution of the

training material while ensuring a consistent

delivery of the course content compared to

traditional classroom based ones. It enables

the e-Learners to have personalized support

from a teacher/instructor and to get feedback

from various means.

Implementation

More than 40 percent of U.S. training

organizations report that they have an LMS

installed, but levels of satisfaction, return on

investment and effectiveness vary, making

selecting the right tool for your situation a

complex process.

Organizations have two choices here - one

would be to shift to a proprietary LMS

platform and the other would be to move to

an open source one like Moodle. Open-

source LMS solutions have been steadily

gaining ground on their commercial

counterparts. Many of these open-source

platforms got their start in academia, but they

have made inroads in the government,

nonprofit, and corporate markets.

Table 1.1 lists some comparisons between a

proprietary and an open source LMS platform.

License Costs

Proprietary Open

Source

High Low

Vendor Lock in High Nil Cost of

Implementation High Low

Flexibility Low High

Support Medium High

Table 1.1

Concept Paper – Open Source in the Learning Enterprise

www.tarams.com

About Tarams Technologies

Tarams provides e-learning solutions across the entire e-learning technology spectrum, since

2005.

We built two enterprise scale LMS solutions for one of the largest publisher in the US

We built a high traffic learner portal serving over 8 million users a year for a Fortune 500 education provider

We have a provided e-learning solutions like content publishing platforms, ecommerce

systems, assessments engines from Fortune 500 companies to non- profit educational

organizations

We have been helping organizations impart education and training by implementing and

customizing Moodle, the world’s most widely adopted learning system. The hosted nature of the

LMS allows for excellent scalability for organization as small as 20 users to organization with

10,000+ users.