I’ve been doing some investigating into the best software and tools to use to produce online learning materials.
I’ve been slightly surprised by what I have found.
Learning Management Systems
There seems to be a whole host of different solutions for the administrative side of providing training and education online. These are the various Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are available. They provide features to help you register students, schedule lessons and activities, collect together learning materials, and other sorts of tasks involved in running a training course.
There seem to be a number of commercial LMS products and web services available that are targeted either at the training needs of large commercial organisations or for use by educational institutions themselves. There are some open source alternatives, the dominant one appears to be Moodle.
I’ve had a little bit of a play with Moodle and I am impressed by the range of features and flexibility that underlie it. But it isn’t the most straightforward thing to use and would require a fair amount of development and customisation to offer a high quality tailored solution. If you were setting up a website to offer a range of training courses online it seems to me the most cost efficient approach to your LMS would be to use Moodle but invest in some technical expertise to help you develop it, possibly by integrating it with WordPress to produce a more attractive website.
Courseware presentations
The thing that has surprised me is the limited range of options for creating the online training courses themselves.
Obviously, there are lots of options for producing and hosting audio and video. Also for putting documents and presentations online. And you can of course create web pages of training materials in numerous ways. But the tools and products available to help you create interactive courseware seem to be limited in their use of technologies.
I once was a big fan of Authorware having used earlier versions of the software. This was mainly because of it’s underlying concept of dragging and dropping objects onto a ‘flow line’. Sadly Adobe, while still selling the product, has chosen to discontinue its development. The reason given is that;
“The eLearning market has transitioned to Adobe Flash…”
It seems that if you what to create really engaging and interactive courseware that makes the most of the medium you really have only one choice and that is to use Flash.
If you wanted to do this is in a big way then you can make use of Adobe’s flash authoring tools. Such as Flash Professional, Adobe Captivate and Director. But this can be expensive. The Adobe eLearning suite for example currently costs £1,714.80.
PowerPoint to Flash
So the most common alternative to building a Flash presentation from scratch seems to be to use PowerPoint and then to use one of the available tools that converts a PowerPoint presentation in to the Flash file format.
There are a number of similar products on the market that do this. The common approach they take is to insert an extra menu tab into your copy of PowerPoint giving you the option to insert extra features like narration and to export as a Flash file. They will also package your presentation together with a Flash player so your file can be placed online and played.
The following products all take this approach:
While creating courses in this way is actually very straightforward and provides a very usable solution for a lot of people, I am pretty dubious about the merits of PowerPoint as a tool as it is. The logic and design behind the creation of a PowerPoint presentation, while familiar and easy for a lot of people to use, is restrictive. Is the conversion of lots of badly designed PowerPoint presentations, overflowing with bullet points, really what we want? What happened to the multimedia future we were promised?
Screencasting
For those creating courseware for training people in computer related activities, tutorials for the use of software products for example, there is also the related issue of screencasting.
Screencasting is;
“A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The term screencast compares with the related term screenshot; whereas screenshot is a picture of a computer screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on a computer screen, enhanced with audio narration.”
There are a range of software tools that can help you to create a screen cast as well as some web services specifically designed to host them;
- Camtasia Studio looks to be the best professional product for Windows
- Open source products for Windows are CamStudio and Wink
- I am also trying out recordMyDesktop for Linux
- Adobe Captivate can also be used for screencasting.
Problems with Flash
When used right Flash can do great things, but there are some problems with it. The obvious restriction is that Apple devices won’t accept it. If people want to look at your training courses on their iPhone or iPad they won’t be able to.
If you want to have your training available to the full range of mobile devices you will need to look at alternatives. You can return to making use of video, although this will sacrifice any interactive elements you have included.
More promising is the use of HTML5. I think this looks to be the best long term choice of alternative technology to replace Flash. But it still has a way to go before it matures and I haven’t found any authoring tools specifically designed to create HTML5 courseware.
So, for anything other than a big budget production, the solution seems to be writing your training course in PowerPoint, possibly adding extra video, and outputting in Flash.