Shropshire Learning Platform

Fronter

27 01 2007

Fronter was founded in Norway in 1998 and is now used by two million users in 2,000 learning institutions through eight countries. In the UK we power the National College for School Leadership’s talk2learn platform and work with several schools, colleges and a number of local authorities.

The Fronter Learning Platform consists of more than 90 tools with functionality in the following areas:

ePortfolio, personal work and social software (web 2.0)
teaching and learning (LMS)
content creation and publishing (LCMS)
collaboration and knowledge management.

Fronter is a fully hosted and managed learning environment and can be integrated with school management information systems (MIS). Fronter is compliant with all established eLearning standards and can be integrated with third party systems and technologies, e.g. Microsoft Learning Gateway. Fronter is available to everybody, with twelve different languages and support for accessibility standards (WAI).

Fronter is based on open technology - Linux, Apache, MySql, Php and the source code is available to customers. This means Fronter provides professional institutions with the benefits of an open source learning platform while at the same time providing a guarantee of security, reliability and scalability, to a fixed cost of ownership.

Users and educationalists are in control of all Fronter developments and all major decisions are taken by our users, or reference groups.

Actions

Informations

Date : 27 January 2007
Categories : Becta, Fronter

One response to “Fronter”

30 01 2007: DJ (MWS) (06:27:17) :

I’ve never used Fronter. I have spoken to them on more than one occasion though and it seems that the small company I was talking to last year has had rapid growth. I hope they can support it when the help calls start flooding in.

There’s an interesting thread from a Fronter user on elgg - Anne Fox talks about her experiences with it. From Tom Soron’s responses, it appears that Fronter’s ideas on what constitutes good learning design follow Microsoft’s ideas on user interfaces for system management:

“the way the content is displayed is very “plain” but this is very deliberate as the focus of Fronter is to effectively mirror the windows explorer environment and windows functionality and so that Fronter does not “get in the way” of the learning”

How many of our learners in Shropshire are allowed access to the full functionality Windows Explorer to be that familiar with it as to find it transparent to their learning?

Tom later goes on to say how resources can be strung together in a cohesive course. I eagerly await that pleasure.