Microsoft’s SharePoint Learning Kit opens its doors to the community
Reading - 9th January, 2007— Microsoft today released the Microsoft® SharePoint® Learning Kit; designed to further extend the Microsoft SharePoint-based Learning Gateway. The company is releasing this innovation to the shared source community at this week’s British Education and Training Technology (BETT) show in London.
SharePoint Learning Kit is a tool for SharePoint 2007 that makes it easy for teachers to turn any electronic document into an online assignment. It can be used by schools, companies or other organisations, and has been released as a community source product, making it free to users, and a platform for more innovation.
Schools can choose their own content creation tools according to their users needs. For example, teachers could use Microsoft Office to create resources such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and animations, or use any content produced to SCORM standards, such as BBC Jam content. Teachers and students use an on-line system to access content and courses, meaning that no programmes have to be installed on users’ computers.
Using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as the platform creates a rich environment for collaboration, sharing and access to learning resources from school and home. Students and teachers can share documents, blogs, wikis as well as learning content, and take advantage of the capabilities of Learning Gateway to integrate other IT systems within the school, such as email, calendars and attendance and assessment information.
Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft said: “Access to e-learning and the use of digital content are critical to preparing students for the opportunities and challenges ahead. We are committed to delivering technology solutions and services that help schools deliver e-learning and effectively provide a rich Web-based learning environment for all students.”
The SharePoint Learning Kit replaces Microsoft Class Server in Microsoft’s Learning Gateway Framework and can be immediately deployed to add e-learning functionality to SharePoint. In addition, SharePoint Learning Kit provides an extensible platform to support educational IT partners and their customers in creating best-of-class learning environments. The community source licence allows these customers and partners to use and redistribute their innovations free of charge, and to contribute them back to the community. This will support further innovation from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) community.
Learning Platform Project Director at RM, Donal Mullins, said: “The SharePoint Learning Kit provides technology that will enable us to add considerable value to our offerings. We plan to use this in coming versions of Kaleidos VTLE, for example to add support for BBC Jam and other SCORM 2004 content. Microsoft’s donation of this technology to the shared source community has made unprecedented access and customisation possible for us and our customers. RM has long enjoyed a strong partnership with Microsoft, and we look forward to being a foundation member of the SharePoint Learning Kit community in the UK.”
By licensing through the Community Source licence, it allows users and other developers, including companies, to modify the code to add new innovations, and release these back to other users. There have already been some developments of additional reporting tools for schools, to allow extended monitoring and management of student learning.
SharePoint Learning Kit
The SharePoint Learning Kit code and specifications can be downloaded free of charge. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/education/learninggateway for links to the code, community sites, and details about the Community Source licence agreement.
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