Does This Sound Familiar?

"I want to start providing some of my training courses online. I already have my classroom materials prepared, so how can I get started?" If that sounds familiar to you then this blog post can help explain where you can go from here.

For starters, you need to be aware of the fact that your original classroom content cannot be delivered on the Web in its original state. So, if your content is currently in the form of PowerPoint slides, video recordings, or even Word documents, it will need to be converted to an online format before you can move it online.

So, how do you "convert" it from its original state to an online format? Well, that's where authoring tools come in.

You can choose which languages you'd like to make available for your organization's users. And, if you're interested in adding support for another language, please contact us.

Esperamos que te guste!

Well, it sounds like that would do the trick and if it's really that easy, then why doesn't everyone do it? So, it's at this point that I began learning a few things from the CSTD "Telling Ain't Training" workshop last month.

Now, if you're looking at that cartoon and at least slightly cracking a smile, then it has served its purpose. By the way, I really look like that; at least 99.9% of the time. I'm also a chatterbox and very much a kid at heart. And if you're wondering right now, as you look at that cartoon, whether or not to take me seriously, well I must tell you; I have extensive industry experience that will prove my credibility. In a nutshell, I have over twelve years of experience in procrastination, nine in perfectionism and at least four being a nonconformist. As you can see, this experience is clearly relevant to the topics I will be discussing.

Moving on, let's talk a little bit about the purpose of this blog series. Cutting to the chase, it's pretty much for newbies. If this is your first time in the elearning pool, then this blog is for you! Now if you're a newbie like me then you've probably only recently frolicked around the shallow end of this pool. But as you may already be dreading, our due date for Olympic enrollment is coming up very soon. So, it's time to jump into the deep end! Can't float? Well, perhaps you can find some comfort in knowing that your water wings could, in essence, be this blog.

This one took a little longer than usual to get out the door, but hopefully it will prove to be worth the wait. We upgraded some of our infrastructure in the process, so we needed to be extra careful to make sure that everything works smoothly. Along with several bug fixes, there are over 20 new features. Here are the highlights:

Custom domains

Interaction Data Report

New file upload interface

We offer our service as a white-label solution. When you offer our LMS to your clients, we want it to appear as if you made it. You control the branding and the terminology used. Your clients see your contact support information and the system can be customized so that emails are sent from your organization.

The final step to completely hide Firmwater from view was to allow you to use your own custom domain. We had done this for a few of our larger clients but it wasn't easy for us to manage this across a large number of clients. Now we can offer it to everybody.

You can now choose to use your own domain. So, instead of sending out addresses to your clients with 'lms.firmwater.com', you can use a URL such as:

'lms.yourcompany.com' or 'portal.yourcompany.com' (or whatever you'd like).

Note that there is an additional monthly charge to make use of a custom domain. This requires some setup on our part and we incur additional costs to purchase a SSL certificate for your domain and for dedicated IP addresses.

If you're interested, or for more details, please contact us.

Simpler login URLs

Upgrading our infrastructure has given us some additional capabilities that we didn't have before. We've now been able to simplify the addresses of your login page and those of your clients (the old addresses still work too). You can now just tack on your client ID to the domain used.

If your client's ID is 'yourclient', their login page can now be accessed at 'lms.firmwater.com/yourclient'. (Previously, you would have to use 'https://lms.firmwater.com/lms/?cid=yourclient'.)

This works if you're using a custom domain as well. Your client's login page would be accessed at 'lms.yourcompany.com/yourclient'.

Improved reporting

Reporting now uses an updated platform, allowing for better support from all browsers and, in many cases, improved report execution times. Users will no longer experience application time outs while interacting with reports for long periods of time. We've also organized the list of reports into menus to make it easier to find similar reports.

Along with making improvements to several of the existing reports, we also added two new reports:

• Interaction Data Report: Export of the SCORM interaction data saved per user attempt. Some content saves question response data to the LMS through this mechanism.
• Location List: Lists all locations and the number of users for each.

Other new features and enhancements

A few more of the new features and enhancements include:

• Support for taxes when making purchases through the LMS.
• Importing of locations, departments, job titles.
• An improved file upload interface.

We hope you enjoy all the new features. To see everything that's new, see the release notes for Version 2.12.

And so, without much further ado, we are quite pleased to announce that we are now on Twitter! Follow us @firmwater to be in-the-know about the most important Firmwater LMS news.

Happy following!

Today, they posted a great article to their blog with a list of 101 quick video tutorials. Each video shows how to do something with one their products -- and all are 5 minutes or less.

I don't use Articulate regularly but I'm often asked how to do a specific task with their products. I've already found a couple of videos in this list that I could have used in the past. Definitely worth checking out, if you use Articulate!

See the article »

With Camtasia Studio 4, the completion status of an SCO was only recorded if the content contained a quiz or survey. If the content did not contain a quiz or survey, the student's status was reported to the LMS as incomplete or unknown. As a work around, we suggested content providers include a survey question at the end of their Camtasia videos asking, for example, whether the lesson was relevant or effective.

With Camtasis Studio 6, that problem has been resolved. Flash videos with or without an embedded quiz or survey correctly report their completion status back to the LMS. This means that content providers can use a variety of other formats to deliver their training, while still being able to track completion. These new formats include WMV, MOV, AVI, RM, CAMV, and animated GIF.

We created a new guide for generating SCORM content with Camtasia Studio 6, with up-to-date instructions and suggested settings. Our findings can be found in the resources section, or here:

• HOW TO GUIDE - Camtasia Studio 6 SCORM Content Authoring (7 pages, 431 KB)

As always, your feedback is encouraged.

Time limited assessments

Assessments can now have time limits. You can specify how long a user has to complete the assessment. The current time remaining is displayed to the user on every screen. When the time exceeds 5 minutes, it is updated once per minute. This approach is taken so the user can focus on responding to the questions and to minimize the distraction provided by the countdown clock.

When the time remaining is less than 5 minutes, it is updated once per second.

If the user doesn't complete the assessment within the allotted time, the assessment is automatically submitted (after notifying the user appropriately).

Our assessment engine natively supports the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) Version 1.2.1 standard. QTI allows durations to be specified at the assessment level. When authoring in QTI, you just need to add a 'duration' element as a child of the 'assessment' element. The format follows ISO 8601 for durations. As an example, 30 minutes would be represented as:

<duration>PT30M</duration>

Shuffing of responses

We also added support for shuffling of responses within an assessment. We've had the ability to shuffle questions -- so that the order of questions are randomized for each attempt -- since our first release but we weren't able to randomize the responses within a question.

Now we can, and as QTI allows, you can choose which questions you want the responses shuffled for. Within each question, you can specify whether to shuffle all responses or only some of the responses. This is useful for when you may want to shuffle all the responses except the last "All of the above" type response.

Need help? Just ask!

If you have any questions about how to take advantage of these new capabilities, please don't hesitate to ask us. To see everything in the new release, see the release notes for Version 2.11.

Completion certificates

sample completion certificate

This feature has come up quite a few times when talking to prospects. We've also heard that it would be useful to some of our existing clients so we decided to add support for it. Firmwater LMS can now generate a completion certificate for a user who has successfully completed an activity. The certificate can be customized for an organization.

You can pick and choose which of your activities that you'd like completion certificates to be available for. We've made this easy by allowing you to specify this individually or as a bulk operation on a group of activities.

Some organizations allow their students to print their own certificates, while others only allow administrators to print them. We let you decide who has access.

See the documentation for more details.

Individual Response Report

Individual Response Report

Administrators can now see a report that shows a user's attempt at an assessment. The report is generated as a PDF and shows score information along with all the questions and responses with correct answers highlighted. This is accessible to administrators when drilling into a user's training plan.

Other new reports

We also added a few new reports that might come in handy. Much of this information is available through the user interface too but it's useful to be able to generate a report and be able to export the data to different formats.

The new reports are:

• Clients List: Available to master administrators, this lists all clients and the number of users for each.
• Users List: Lists all users. When exported to CSV or XML, all user fields are included. This is good way to get a CSV file to use to import back into the system.
• Activities List: Lists all activities, can be filtered by tag.

We hope you enjoy the changes. To see everything that's new, see the release notes for Version 2.10.

Firmwater offers an online learning management service, designed to help training vendors grow their business, by selling and delivering their training online.

In order to become a Gold Partner, Firmwater's software application underwent several rigorous tests by Microsoft, to ensure full functionality and compatibility with Microsoft products. Mastering these tests gave Firmwater the Software Solutions Competency for Independent Software Vendors (ISV). Microsoft also requires several client references from satisfied clients to complete the Gold Partner award.

Microsoft recognizes that Firmwater is not only competent in its development of high-end software applications, but also worthy of Microsoft's trust through solid services provided to its clients. Thus, Microsoft awarded Firmwater a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

What does this mean to you as a Firmwater prospect or client?

It gives you Microsoft's assurance that Firmwater is a strategic vendor, whom you can trust. Not only has its software been certified by the world's largest and most accomplished software developer, but it also ensures that Firmwater's clients stand behind Firmwater as a strategic partner in growing their business.

As always, your comments are sincerely welcome.

Importing users much improved

new import users wizard

One major change in this release is with the process of importing users. We've turned it into a three-step wizard, giving much more control and feedback over the changes that will be made. Most CSV files are generated from Microsoft Excel and we've tried to deal with some of the inconsistencies with the way that it sometimes saves data.

Improvements with the new process:

• allows any column headings in the CSV file, try to match to fields in the system
• full control on the field matching, ability to ignore columns
• much better error reporting, ability to download error file
• ability to download file with the passwords generated for new users
• control over whether the data of existing users is updated or not
• ability to see the number of changes before confirming the operation

Other improvements

Other notable enhancements in this release include:

• Changed ordering of training plans to give greater importance to assignments. Activities from the same assignment are now grouped together and are listed in the order that they were added to the assignment.
• Enhancements to Web Services API
• Resolved error loading content generated using Articulate Studio '09

To see all the changes, see the release notes for Version 2.9. Enjoy.

In order to help you understand the best practices for finding the right LMS for your situation, we have authored a guide especially for you. The guide outlines seven factors you need to consider when searching for a LMS.

The guide is called 7 Key Things for Training Vendors to Consider When Selecting a Learning Management System. As always, your comments are sincerely welcomed.

Improved assignments

improved assignment wizard

The major change in this release relates to the handling of assignments. We've restricted the list of assignments to only those that affects users within your scope. Some of our clients have hundreds of locations and thousands of assignments. In the past, local administrators could see all assignments within their organization but only edit those that included their users. Now, their view has been simplified greatly.

We also improved on the creation and editing of assignments:

• user no longer needs to page through all pages in the wizard when editing an assignment
• better handling of long content/users lists in summaries
• indicate assignments that are automatically created by the system

Other improvements

Other notable enhancements in this release include:

• Allowing local administrators ability to manage list of participants within their scope for content and view content details
• Improved immediate question feedback support in our assessment engine
• Support for payment information when editing a user's membership details
• HTTP AICC/CMI Protocol: increase flexibility to provide support for more external LMSs
• Web Services API improvements

You can read the release notes for Version 2.8. Enjoy.

Strength, courage, determination, commitment, selflessness. Some might say that our firefighters should be role models for how we behave both within and outside our organizations. Even though saving lives, and rescuing kittens from trees might not be in your job description, learning how firefighters train for their job, might just help you become an everyday hero in yours.

Behavioural researcher Wendy Joung and her colleagues were interested in examining whether certain types of training programs would be more effective than others, at minimizing errors in judgment on the job. Specifically they wanted to know whether focusing the trainee on past errors that others have made would provide better training than focusing the trainee on how others had made good decisions in the past.

They thought that training that focused on others' errors would be more effective for several reasons, including increased attention to the training, and a more memorable training experience. The researchers aimed to test their hypothesis on a group of people whose decision making skills under stress were vital, and whose decisions carried important consequences; it's not surprising they chose firefighters.

In the study, a training and development session, that included several case studies, were presented to the firefighters. However, the nature of the case studies differed between two groups of participants. One group learned from case studies that described real life situations in which other firefighters made poor decisions that led to negative consequences. The other group learned from case studies in which firefighters avoided negative consequences through good decision making.

Joung and her colleagues found that firefighters who underwent the error-based training showed improved judgment, and were able to think more adaptively than those who underwent error-free training. Training is all about influencing others. So, if you want to maximize your influence on employees' future behaviour, the implications for your organization's training programs are clear.

Although many companies typically focus their training exclusively on the positive - in other words on how to make good decisions - the results of this study suggest that a sizable portion of the training should be devoted to how others have made errors in the past, and how those errors could have been (and can be) avoided. Specifically, case studies, videos, illustrations, and personal testimonials of mistakes should be followed by a discussion of what actions would have been appropriate to take in these and in similar situations.

Of course, specific individuals don't have to be singled out by management for their previous poor decision making. These error based experiences can be completely anonymous. However, you might find that some of the more experienced and respected employees are more than happy to donate their error-laden "war stories" to the company's training archive.