Looking to buy or rent an LMS? Could a Bright-based WordPress system fit the bill?

To understand this, it first helps to understand, “What is WordPress?”:

What is WordPress?

For businesses, WordPress is an extremely vertatile technology that helps them maintain content, engage in social media, perform well in search engines and minimize out of house costs.

How popular is it?

Wordpress Usage in the top one millions sites: Source builtwith.com

As can be seen above, WordPress is the top CMS platform used on the internet today. It does comprise more websites than every other CMS platform combined.

In many ways the popularity of WordPress can be attributed to :

• The flexibility of the platform is renowned.
• Nearly 25000 available plugins, the vast majority free.
• 1000s of available themes.

How can WordPress be used as a learning site?

scorm.com has produced a nice case study on how WordPress can be used effectively as an alternative to commercial LMS systems.

How do I do it?

Some assembly required

The degree of flexibility of the WordPress platform, plus the vast array of free plugins for the platforms, means the acquisition process of a WordPress learning site is slightly different than the procurement process for a shrink wrapped LMS solution.

The question shifts from “does this LMS support this feature?” to “how easily will our WordPress-based learning site support this feature?” The vast number of sites that run WordPress insures that in most cases, whatever you want to do with your WordPress site, somebody somewhere has already done it. Flexible authentication, social media integration, shopping carts, event management, polling, sharing, chat, you name it.

The Cream Rises to the Top

Since most WordPress features “snap-in” via plugins, you will find that competition between competing implementations of certain features mean that in many cases, there are several alternatives available to deliver a particular feature.

More choice tends to infuse a drive for quality as competing plugin developers compete to be the leader in their respective spaces.

The End Result

Constructing a learning site based on WordPress, is about acquiring highly flexible, customizable, and low cost infrastructure that can grow as you grow.

One of the trends we see in LMS acquisition that if you survey all the stakeholders and ask “what features must our LMS have?”, you can end up with a pretty long list.

But after going through the time and expense to acquire an LMS system, you may find that in practice you don’t use or need all of the features that you spent your time and money acquiring. In some cases this feature creep is driven not by an immediate need, but a sense that “if we don’t get it now, we won’t get later”. In the world of vendor lock-in, this is a real concern.

Building a WordPress-based learning system is different. The easy to integrate environment and proliferation of plugins and expertise for the WordPress platform means even if you don’t get it now, you can have it later (if you want it).

For some organizations, it is liberating to move to from “what features do we need anytime, forever” to “what do we need today?” And for many, that means less time and less money.

How can Bright help?

Bright is an innovative platform for integrating trackable e-learning into web construction platforms like WordPress.

Bright enables many functions that are typically found in a commercial LMS system to be integrated and embedded in a WordPress site. And Aura can provide the expertise to move you from your requirements document to a functioning learning site in short order.

Find out more about Bright here.