Integrated Sloan School at MIT
Testimonial: MIT Sloan School of Management
The Sloan School of Management at MIT is one of the premier business schools in the world. .LRN is used at MIT Sloan as the course management system for all its courses and as a community platform to support over one hundred (100+) communities, ranging from student clubs to research groups. We have 5,000 active users and approximately 1,200 unique logins per day.
Faculty use .LRN to manage all course-related information, ranging from posting lecture notes to setting up collaborative spaces for team-based projects. Students begin using .LRN well before they arrive on campus, receiving information from the program offices, signing up for local Sloan-sponsored events, and communicating with alumni.
The community persists as a life-time virtual space. Research centers at MIT Sloan use .LRN as an intranet application as well as to collaborate with research and industry sponsors and this year we will be rolling out .LRN systematically to all our alumni for social networking, collaboration, and lifelong learning.
.LRN is also in use by our Executive Education program to support custom executive education delivery to senior managers for prestigious clients such as British Petroleum and Merrill Lynch. Recently, we have developed interactive simulations in .LRN, including a trading game for teaching Finance and a multi-party negotiation exercise that will be used in multiple classes.
We are also now enjoying benefits from the open source character of the platform. Contributions by other Consortium members, such as external authentication and internationalization, are major enhancements to the platform funded by other institutions.
Although cost was an important consideration, our principal rationale for choosing .LRN was our need to support teaching and research through a flexible, secure, and scalable platform. .LRN has been in production use at MIT Sloan for four years and has become a mission critical part of our teaching and research environment.
Alfred H. Essa
Chief Information Officer
MIT Sloan School of Management