learningBLUE™ is an open source, hosted, Learning Management Solution (LMS) that using sound principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. learningBLUE™ can be used in-house as a education platform for your employees or can also be used externally to provide knowledge about your products and services to your Customers or Partners. All of the education and training is provided online via a web browser and includes the following key features:


- Promotes a social constructionist pedagogy (collaboration, activities, critical reflection, etc)

- Suitable for 100% online classes as well as supplementing face-to-face learning

- Simple, lightweight, efficient, compatible, low-tech browser interface

- Easily available via our ASP Hosting Center

- Full database abstraction supports all major brands of database (except for initial table definition)

- Course listing shows descriptions for every course on the server, including accessibility to guests.

- Courses can be categorised and searched - one learningBLUE site can support thousands of courses

- Emphasis on strong security throughout. Forms are all checked, data validated, cookies encrypted etc

- Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor

Course Management Module

- A full teacher has full control over all settings for a course, including restricting other teachers
Choice of course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focussed social format

- Flexible array of course activities - Forums, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops

- Recent changes to the course since the last login can be displayed on the course home page - helps give sense of community

- Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor

- All grades for Forums, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page (and downloaded as a spreadsheet file)

- Full user logging and tracking - activity reports for each student are available with graphs and details about each module (last access, number of times read) as well as a detailed "story" of each students involvement including postings etc on one page.

- Mail integration - copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text.

- Custom scales - teachers can define their own scales to be used for grading forums and assignments

- Courses can be packaged as a single zip file using the Backup function. These can be restored on any learningBLUE environment

Assignment Module

- Assignments can be specified with a due date and a maximum grade.
Students can upload their assignments (any file format) to the server - they are date-stamped.

- Late assignments are allowed, but the amount of lateness is shown clearly to the teacher

- For each particular assignment, the whole class can be assessed (grade and comment) on one page in one form.

- Teacher feedback is appended to the assignment page for each student, and notification is mailed out.

- The teacher can choose to allow resubmission of assignments after grading (for regrading)

Community Forum Module

- Different types of forums are available, such as teacher-only, course news, open-to-all, and one-thread-per-user.

- All postings have the authors photo attached.

- Discussions can be viewed nested, flat or threaded, oldest or newest first.

- Individual forums can be subscribed to by each person so that copies are forwarded via email, or the teacher can force subscription for all

- The teacher can choose not to allow replies (eg for an announcements-only forum)

- Discussion threads can be easily moved between forums by the teacher

- Attached images are shown inline

- If forum ratings are being used, these can be restricted to a range of dates

Quiz Module

- Teachers can define a database of questions for re-use in different quizzes

- Questions can be stored in categories for easy access, and these categories can be "published" to make them accessible from any course on the site.

- Quizzes are automatically graded, and can be re-graded if questions are modified

- Quizzes can have a limited time window outside of which they are not available
At the teacher's option, quizzes can be attempted multiple times, and can show feedback and/or correct answers

- Quiz questions and quiz answers can be shuffled (randomised) to reduce cheating

- Questions allow HTML and images

- Questions can be imported from external text files

- Attempts can be cumulative, if desired, and finished over several sessions

- Multiple-choice questions supporting single or multiple answers

- Short Answer questions (words or phrases)

- True-False questions

- Matching questions

- Random questions

- Numerical questions (with allowable ranges)

- Embedded-answer questions (cloze style) with answers within passages of text

Resource Module

- Supports display of any electronic content, Word, Powerpoint, Flash, Video, Sounds etc

- Files can be uploaded and managed on the server, or created on the fly using web forms (text or HTML)

- External content on the web can be linked to or seamlessly included within the course interface.

- External web applications can be linked in with data passed to them

Survey Module

- Built-in surveys (COLLES, ATTLS) have been proven as instruments for analysing online classes

- Online survey reports always available, including many graphs. Data is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV text file.

- Survey interface prevents partly-finished surveys.

- Feedback is provided to the student of their results compared to the class averages

Workshop Module

- Allows peer assessement of documents, and the teacher can manage and grade the assessment.

- Supports a wide range of possible grading scales

- Teacher can provide sample documents for students to practice grading

- Very flexible with many options

Click Here to access our learningBLUE Demo.

Click Here to access our learningBLUE data sheet.