Into the Cloud
We think WordPress is really going to shake up the world of e-learning. Here’s why:
Let me take you on a journey back in time, to when the monolithic LMS stalked the earth. Large, lumbering pieces of software craned into HR departments around the world, with six-figure installation costs, which sit there, waiting either for learners to show up and use them, or courses to be uploaded onto them.
It would be nice if a meteor strike had wiped them out aeons ago, but sadly, they are still around. Collecting dust, training records, and expense.
Things are changing though. The old model of the LMS is being dismantled piece-by-piece, and that’s happening because of three big IT trends going on right now: OpenSource, Cloud Computing and Social Networks. And WordPress is part of all of those changes.
Open Source – the End of the Monolith
Most people have some familiarity with the notion of Open Source – software that benefits from the collective use or improvement of the people who are involved with it. The Firefox browser and the Linux operating system are well known examples. WordPress is an Open-Source Content Management System, which means that it’s useful for running Websites, Blogs and Intranets of all stripes.
This might initially not sound as though it has much to do with the LMS (which is primarily a tool for tracking user’s participation in e-learning courses), but actually, it does. WordPress is designed around the notion of extensibility: as well as being open source so that people can contribute changes to the core platform itself, people can also contribute extensions to WordPress (called plugins). So, building an LMS by extending WordPress is not that crazy an idea.
This is a problem for the monolithic LMS because it can’t keep up. WordPress as a platform is constantly being improved by its (ever growing) community of contributors. That LMS placed in the IT department 10 years ago might look today exactly as it did when it was first installed.
Cloud Computing – Always On, Always Up To Date
This brings us on to Cloud Computing. This is a catch-all notion for the idea that services, instead of being run within your company, can be served up to you over the Internet “the cloud”. Two key advantages of this are that someone else (i.e. not you or your IT guys) is making sure the service is always running, and by centralising it somewhere on the internet, it’s possible to keep it up to date with security fixes, bug fixes and improvements.
WordPress embodies this philosophy. Between January 2010 and February 2011, they had 10 version releases, including two major functionality releases. The other 8 releases were point releases to fix security holes and bugs, found by their huge user base around the world. Only by providing a service “in the cloud” could a software platform hope to keep up with this level of evolution.
On To Social
In a way, the rise of the social network is an excellent example of how the original LMS model struggles to keep up. Websites like Facebook and LinkedIn have gained huge popularity over the last five years or so, and the functionality they provide around discussions, content sharing and peer communication is an obvious pedagogical fit with the e-learning paradigm. So LMS vendors have scrambled to include social functionality within their platforms as fast as they can: each is offering a different spin on things: discussion groups, wall posts, threaded conversations, commenting and so on.
But have they got it right? Social functionality is generally not a walled garden. The value of the social network is based on the number of connections within it (see Metcalfe’s Law). Sometimes, having a conversation within an LMS between a few people who are taking a course together adds some value. But there is much more value in this conversation occurring across the social network, over the whole enterprise, over the world.
Now, the dust has not settled on Social yet: every few months it seems there is a new social service gaining traction (think: Instagram, FourSquare, Twitter…) – the rules are still being written (especially within the enterprise). But a great thing about WordPress is that it gets this: as new social functionality appears on the internet, new extensions for WordPress are built which interoperate with it. There’s WordPress Twitter integration, WordPress Facebook integration, even a WordPress “Facebook” implementation (called BuddyPress).
If your LMS says it “does social” then consider – what does this really mean? Are we just talking discussion groups? Or can they say they are genuinely evolving along with the concept of social, as it’s happening on the Internet?
It’s All About Evolution
So, those three big trends are why we think WordPress is going in the right direction, and why have used it as the basis for Bright. In essence – it’s all about evolution. With WordPress, we can change and improve our software far faster than we could by trying to build yet another walled-garden in-house LMS.
Because we can change it faster, we can build value more quickly. Because we can do that, we can create more value and more cost savings for our customers. Simple as that.