Well I told you how to get your very own LMS, and it was good, fast and cheap.
good (software)
fast (implementation)
cheap (solution)
Now I'm going to tell you how to spice it up. Let's Moodle-in some Flash.
I know what you are thinking, "Now he'll make me bleed money through my nose!". Not true!
There a couple of options, to integrate Flash to our Moodle LMS which are just as good, just as fast and... Over all, just as cheap. The options are Wink and OpenOffice.org.
First, let's talk about Wink (homepage, download). Wink is not, sadly, open source software. It is, however, free of cost for now. It is extremely useful for making computer software tutorials. With some practice and tweaking you can make some really useful flash-based animations that take very little space storage-wise.
What is open-source, is OpenOffice.org new beta version (homepage, download). One of it's components, Impress, has an export to Flash option. And, since Impress can open most PowerPoint presentations with ease this means that any presentation previously created on PowerPoint can be delivered as a flash file by your Moodle LMS solution.
As a side note, you can also open your Word (or most other Microsoft Office files) documents with OpenOffice.org various applications and export them to PDF. Yes, I know that you can actually put MS Office files on Moodle as is, but you miss the point. The point is that all of the applications I have been talking about are available at no cost to you either because they are free / open source software or just plain free of charge.
Maybe I should tell you in my next post how much you would have to spend in non open source software in order to get a comparable solution that is much more complex and harder to implement.
The information soldier is frugal in his choice of weapons...
