Learn.com is an Elearning solutions company which provides online, on-demand courses for various fields. Learn.com had concentrated till now on corporate training for small / large business firms and government organisations, but has recently launched Learn.com Personal Edition for individuals to hone their skills in various fields.

You can browse through courses based on your job profile – whether it be business administration, IT, sales, marketing, finance, etc. Once you do that – or choose a course separately – you get to complete the course at your own pace. Quite a few of these courses also have tests thrown in. For nominal monthly fees you also have courses in a few areas from Boston University and Cornell University. If you’re an expert in some field then you can also create your own course and sell it on Learn.com. The variety of courses is huge – CCNA, Novell, basic IT skills, management-related courses, personal development etc. As of now I didn’t find any ‘Skill Score’ related tests on computers / IT related fields but new courses are being added at regular intervals.

Certain free courses on Learn.com are also available. These are mostly on personal development. A few (like the one on junk mail) were completely lame – slapping on a few pages of content does not qualify as a ‘course’. Certainly not a good way to make an impression if you want a surfer to buy premium packages. It seems that content is provided by Learn.com partners.

The idea is good but the execution is terrible. I tried out a free courses for the purposes of writing this review and I found that in certain courses it was loading content from external servers which were malfunctioning. The course on Word 2007 / Powerpoint 2007 failed to load content from a partner Learn2.com because it could not connect to external server; besides, these two particular courses (not the other free ones) require you to install a plugin called ‘Street Stream’. I also tried out the stress managment course – this one was from MindLearn. Course window seemed to load fine, and I proceed to skill assessment test / course content. Whichever you choose, you’ll be shown a question to answer. Clicking an answer and submitting fails. Possibly because the script which is supposed to process that doesn’t exist / wasn’t reachable.

Error encountered in Learn.com Personal Edition while accessing a course

While in theory Learn.com is a terrific idea, in reality (from what I encountered in the free courses – things may be different in paid course) the implementation is unreliable. It’s early days yet for this service. Hopefully the kinks get worked out soon and then we’ll have an Elearning service which industry professionals can use to sharpen their skills or acquire new ones.

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