A handful of leading universities have developed a new consortium to raise awareness and increase the use of a free, open-source software platform for managing courses, content, collaboration, and online learning.

The software, known as .LRN ("dot-learn"), was originally developed for use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It is a completely free, open-source application suite and development platform reportedly capable of: managing course syllabi, calendars, and class lists; offering community support tools such as surveys, polls, bulletin boards, and file storage; and managing learning and content with assessment tools and testing modules.

"Any institution, whether a K-12 school or institution of higher education, that is unable to get or unable to afford what it needs from a commercial [product] should look at .LRN," said Cesar Brea, a member of the board of directors for the .LRN Consortium.

MIT's Sloan School of Management embraced the open-source .LRN platform, which has been used to enroll more than 10,000 students.

"The consortium is a formal, not-for-profit program to raise awareness and to raise money to develop the software faster than a pure grassroots process," Brea said. By establishing a formal consortium, organizers hope to reach more people sooner.

The MIT Sloan School of Management, which has been using .LRN since 2001, runs nearly all of its classes and clubs on .LRN under a project known as SloanSpace. SloanSpace has become Sloan School's primary means of providing class management and community support. It receives about 1,250 log-ins per day and has enrolled more than 10,000 student and faculty users.

Although MIT has spent roughly $500,000 to deploy and maintain .LRN, the project reportedly has cost only one-quarter of the total price that would have been charged by a commercial software provider.

"We have benefited tremendously by utilizing .LRN as a central element of our educational technology infrastructure in the MIT Sloan School," said Steven D. Eppinger, a professor, deputy dean, and chair of the Educational Technology Task Force at the MIT Sloan School.

"It integrates course management with collaboration support for online communities. We have been pleased with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that .LRN has afforded us so far," Eppinger said. "We look forward to seeing its further innovations."

In addition to the online communities, Sloan's professors use .LRN as their platform for publishing course content, posting events, collaborating in team areas, and running simulations.