The Internet has revolutionized many aspects of modern life, including business, news, communication and education. Distance has been effective eliminated, and busineses and Educational Institutions can now access a global marketplace.
Like many areas of our lives, the Internet has impacted Education, with un-heard of methods, such as Distance Education becoming almost common place. Surprisingly, the effectiveness of education does not depend on the format. In other words, education from a traditional brick and mortal classroom is just as effective as education online or through distance education.
This type of dramatic research finding, combined with the growth of the Internet and the legacy issues of traditional public sector education, have created a fertile environment for web based education of all types. Not only are thousands of Colleges and Universities using new technology to expand their offerings, but individuals and companies are offering innovative and specialized online courses.
Creating an online course is not as difficult as you might think. Web based educational plateform have a number of requirements. Generally they require a large and scalable database capacity. And because of the oftenenormous volume of material, a single comprehensive management system is required to arrange, structure, organized and update the material.
These requirements are tailor made for one of the most popular web applications, Content Management Systems, or CMS.
Content Management Systems are a web based software application for managing files, text multimedia and web content. CMS provide comprehensive management of huge amounts of content from a single interface. Thousands or tens of thousands of webpages, created by dozens of individuals or departments can be simply and easily managed.
With a CMS system you can:

• Easily and quickly add, edit or delete content
• Target content to different audiences such as prospective students or enrolled students.
• Provide consistent graphic interface throughout the website
• Easily and quickly scale yp your offerings-go from 10 documents to 10,000 documents
• Technical and non-technical educators and students can easily use
• Use for self paced or instructor led learning
• Easily track student progress
• Quickly assemble and package online courses
• Easily import course material
• Facilitates easy communication and collaboration between students, instructors and administrators.

Many businesses and individuals have a wealth of material that could be easily converted into online courses, but are held back, imagining the cost would be prohibitive or the applications to complicated and difficult to manage.
The Open Source Revolution has changed all of this. Today, Open Source CMS systems are available at no charge, and have all the functionality or commercial CMS. Systems. With the backing of industry gaints such as IBM, the Open Source movement with its collaborative development model is now producing exceptionally high quality products. Open Source pols the expertise, and experience of veteran programmers who actually use the applications, to create stable, secure and scalable software solutions which are continually refined and updated.
Due to the collaborative development model, Open Source CMS code is written to very high standardss making it easy to modify and custimize for the particular and unique needs of an online course.
If you have always wanted to share your knowledge, offer a training course, or even manage an online education portal, and Open Source CMS system is a cost effective, secure solution.