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Features
This article will focus on infrastructure—software products to manage and deliver e-learning. The fragmentation of the e-learning market provided a challenge in writing this article. It is hard to define product categories, because there are large areas of overlapping functionality among products and a lack of agreed-upon definitions. This article will focus on the technology categories designed specifically for e-learning: courseware authoring tools, LMSs, and learning content management systems (LMCSs); provide an overview of each category; identify leading products by category; and suggest some of the features/capabilities to consider when making selection decisions for e-learning technologies.
It is simple. Information professionals are in the business of creating environments, like intranets, for the effective transfer of information to the appropriate users so they can create personal knowledge. This is the process of "informing" and that is what information pros do, and do well. The process of knowledge creation that happens at the user level is called learning. These two processes are important and critical sides of the same coin. Informing without learning is the equivalent of placing article photocopies and books on a desktop and not reading them. No matter how carefully selected and chosen, the end result is moot. Learning without information or content is again risky and, arguably, significantly impacts progress in an intellectual arena.
When the Web and Internet exploded in the 1990s, so too did the tantalizing promise that a corresponding wealth of understanding and communication would be available within private companies. Private companies both large and small were quick to create intranets and extranets to serve their employees, clients, and customers. By 1996, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies had an intranet up and running. But 5 years later, were they working? Not really, according to usability expert Alison J. Head in her groundbreaking research study, “On-The-Job Research: How Usable Are Corporate Intranets?”
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