Content Development
Posted April 1, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane
One of our clients was having problems yesterday loading some content to our Learning Management System (LMS) that was created with Adobe Presenter.
Being new to working with a LMS, he’s not well-versed in the technical jargon of the learning industry — he doesn’t speak SCORM. He had a folder of content and wanted to be able to load it and have students view it. Understandable. Our client had received the published files from a colleague so he hadn’t actually used Presenter himself, nor did he know what format the files were in.
I’m not aware of any of our other clients’ use of Adobe Presenter so I didn’t have any hands on experience with it. In the PowerPoint-to-Flash learning category of authoring tools, the majority leans heavily to the use of Articulate Presenter. Articulate has great support and a strong community behind them. They’ve got lots of useful articles about working with their tools, including this one detailing step-by-step instructions for publishing to a LMS. Adobe… not so much.
I went hunting on the Web for instructions to help our client out. The best I could find on how to publish from Presenter to a LMS was a partial screen shot of the product’s ‘Reporting’ tab (on Adobe’s features page).
Since I couldn’t find any instructions, I figured it would be worthwhile to download their product, try it out and document how to do it.
Continued...
Posted October 5, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
Articulate is one of the more popular content authoring tools used by our clients. Their tools are easy to use and they seem to have helpful support and a great community behind them.
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 »
Posted July 10, 2009 by Liam Miller-Cushon
We have previously evaluated two popular content authoring tools: Adobe Captivate versions 2 and 3, and Techsmith Camtasia Studio 4. Since that time, Techsmith has released a new version: Camtasia Studio 6. We recently investigated what this new version offers.
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:
As always, your feedback is encouraged.
Posted December 10, 2007 by Benjamin Schmidt
We recently evaluated two of the more popular content authoring tools: Adobe Captivate 2 and Techsmith Camtasia Studio 4. During our evaluation, Adobe released a new version: Captivate 3. So we spent time evaluating the features of their new version as well.
We created a document that compares Captivate 2 and 3, and acts as a guide on how to create SCORM compliant training content using the new version. It outlines specific recommendations and instructions on optimizing the functionality of training courses you create. You can find this document in the resources section or here:
We welcome your comments!
Posted November 29, 2007 by Benjamin Schmidt
Our clients often ask us what the best product is for creating SCORM training content. We decided to evaluate the most popular tools so that we are able to provide the best advice. We started with Adobe Captivate 2 and Techsmith Camtasia 4 and spent four months working with the products.
Both of these products are general purpose content development environments — generating SCORM packages is just one of their output options. We found that each product has its strengths and weaknesses. Our advice for which of the products to choose really depends on what you want to use it for. We’ve added our findings to our resources section, but you can also find them here:
Let us know what you think.
