LRN Kit Aids Courseware Development

Microsoft has released a toolkit for developers creating online educational and corporate training materials. The toolkit is part of Microsoft’s larger Knowledge Management strategy and may be particularly applicable in the lucrative corporate training market. The Learning Resource iNnterchange (LRN) toolkit outlines an XML-based system for packaging and describing educational content. The toolkit includes detailed descriptions of the LRN XML schema, a validator that ensures LRN packages are correctly formed, and a viewer for LRN packages. Sample courses built with the package can be downloaded from the LRN Web site.

The toolkit enables content developers to create courses that can be used by a variety of online education systems. For example, it allows individual units of a course to be exported or packaged separately from a larger collection of content. It automatically indexes content and creates a table of contents that allows students to navigate quickly through course material.