In choosing online learning technologies like LMSs, or platforms for your own courseware, it's wise to think outside the PC box. Consider an LMS that is fully integrated with Apple software. You'll discover tools like the Apple Podcast Producer, which allows course authors to record, upload, and convert learning content into a podcast for wider and more convenient distribution.

Using LMS tools such as text editor, question bank, and video, assessment, and quiz tools, organizations are able to cut the costs inherent to traditional training methods.

Courseware platforms and LMSs allow for the free creation of learning and training modules. Trainers and subject matter experts can use the authoring and distribution tools to sell and deliver content.

With more organizations adopting their own learning management system, the traditional style of creating and distributing knowledge is being redefined. Whether it's corporate training or classroom pedagogy, interactive tools like LMSs and Web 2.0 technologies are seeing an end to the days in which one person dominated the floor and simply dispensed information to an all-ears audience. Now learners' ears can finally join forces with their eyes, mouths and hands.

That's not to say that instructional design--the curriculum-based pedagogy in which one person dispenses information and others receive it--no longer has a rightful place in a learning system. While the shift from lectures to hands-on learning and collaboration opens new educational possibilities, straightforward lectures are a vital aspect of any educational format. Lectures lay the framework for students to work their own way through the course material. In a training course hosted via a learning management system, lectures can be presented in an engaging and convenient manner, via audio or video.

Within Apple-integrated courseware creation toolkits, podcasts are an increasingly popular learning tool, with an exciting array of educational possibilities. Podcasts are convenient and optimally portable, and appeal to many learning styles. They can be used to supplement and reinforce course learning material, or renew learning activities. They can serve as announcements, reminders, and updates to be heard by everyone using the learning management system. Podcasts can be used to distribute interviews and discussions, or to inform learners what to expect in the next lesson or activity.

Using the Apple Podcast Producer, podcasts are easy to create, produce, and share. And of course, listeners don't need an iPod to listen to them. Podcasts are typically in the form of mp3 files, making them accessible to all learners. Using group communication such as Google groups, social networking sites and wikis, in combination with learning management systems, trainers and educators have a growing variety of engaging learning tools at hand. And tapping into those resources is usually much easier than one might imagine.