Marching toward release of an open learning system…
Posted by bryanzug - 2007/09/05
I’ve been marching busily during recent months toward release of a 200+ lesson web based training system for the new phase of a clinical information system at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.
Hope to release details soon on the site so those of you in the elearning space can take a look.
The architecture of the thing should be very interesting to those of you who lament with me how learning management systems (LMS’s) too often function as walled gardens — and cut off discoverability and content re-use as a result.
Stay tuned for the hard launch.
Adobe Captivate 2 Announced
Posted by bryanzug - 2006/09/06
Adobe Captivate 2 (aka RoboDemo 6 or 7 depending on how you count) was announced yesterday. Should ship in October. I’ve been a beta tester of it for the last few months though have not had much time to actively test it in daily production.
That said — this is definitely the most robust version of Captivate yet. Would recommend an upgrade for anyone using it regularly.
Silke Fleischer from Adobe has a good writeup here.
Notable new features include —
- Visual scenario branching
- Manage project interactions globally
- Flash Video
- Reusable content via project library
- Zoom in or gray out
- Custom skins and menus
- Custom scoring slides
- Better UI (yay layer locking!)
I think Captivate still stands up as the best mid-to-entry level tool for rapid development of interactive screen based demos/sims.
The downside to it’s model is that it is difficult to update/maintain/scale large projects over time because so many things are not editable. Things are, for the most part, cut-up screenshots with some interactivity overlayed for the single points of interactivity that are automatically captured.
Adding multiple points of interactivity involves manually creating a lot of interactions. While you can (and I have) do many amazing things by exporting to the Flash IDE as a FLA, it does require a lot of technical knowhow.
In my perfect world, Captivate 3 would be able to incorporate the object level richness that Knowledge Planet’s Firefly does.
I would love Captivate to be able to capture every object in the screen for each interaction in a way that is editable later (like change the text on a button) and that multiple interaction paths could be easily created by drawing relationships between screens and doing the required action.
Captivate 2.0 Beta is underway!
Posted by bryanzug - 2006/05/17
Great news for those of us who are Captivate fans — Captivate 2.0 is in Beta 2 (closed beta) — those of you who were worried about the future of our beloved sim tool post Adobe/Macromedia merger, fear no more.
I’m part of the beta group and have to say that it is very nice. Some fantastic enhancements are on the way with usability, productivity, and architecture.
Can’t say more, but would suggest you keep an eye on Silke Fleischer’s new Adobe blog.
eLearning Software Recommendations for the Subject Matter Expert (SME)
Posted by bryanzug - 2006/02/03
I get asked a lot about what tools to use for creating software training eLearning.
I usually break things down into two specialist areas — that of the Subject Matter Expert (SME) and that of the Technical Producer. This post covers my short list of recommendations for the SME.
Producing eLearning is unique in that we are often asking people who have little background (or interest!) in full blown multimedia design to create multimedia lessons that are then aggregated, in various ways, to create courses.
To a typical SME, having to learn a second career as a multimedia developer is pretty discouraging.
Why?
Because it removes them from the natural habitat of their knowledge base (which is the reason you’ve asked them to be a SME in the first place — there’s a post in there somewhere about the care and feeding of SME’s, but I digress).
It is only natural that we want SME’s to have easy tools and methods at their disposal in order to rapidly prototype their content (you can probably tell I have one hand raised in favor of agile development).
Here’s my short list of SME tool categories with quick explanations of each of my picks.
Lesson Creation
Adobe Captivate (formerly Macromedia Captivate — $500 list)
I’ve used Captivate most over the past few years as my content creation tool of choice.
Captivate combines sequential object aware screen capture with a PowerPoint on steroids approach that leaves most SME’s feeling empowered (instead of intimidated). It also has tools to build in pretty nice interactive simulations and is SCORM compliant.
(SCORM compliancy for tools is something that deserves an article in itself — In short this is an industry standard that enables tools, systems, and content to talk to one another — ergo, you want to make sure any lesson creation tool you use is SCORM compliant.)
Go to this case study I wrote last year for MX Developers Journal for the details of why I used this tool for a particular project.
The short scoop — Captivate is easy for the SME’s to rough out their lessons, then the content can be pushed out to various formats for editorial review or further technical development (Microsoft .doc, compiled Flash .swf, developer Flash .fla).
Knowledge Planet’s Firefly ($10,000 list)
A tool that I have not had a chance to use but have been pretty impressed with in demo’s is Knowledge Planet’s Firefly. Don’t let the fact that it’s hard to find Firefly details on their web site fool you — this thing is powerful (see a Firefly demo here).
It is also SCORM compliant and does just about everything that Captivate does — but, instead of capturing screenshots of software, Firefly builds an interactive mimic of the entire application interface of anything you are capturing.
Not only does it provide a richer experience that feels much more like the real app, it also provide multiple task paths that SME’s can easily edit. (i.e. What’s the ‘correct’ way to print in Word?). This, combined with an instructionally sound “See, Try, Do, Test†lesson model may make Firefly worth the $$ (which I often see discounted every quarter to $5000 sans personal training).
Image Editing
I’m a firm believer that eLearning content prototyping should not bottleneck at the door of the geeks (read graphic designers and multimedia developers).
I don’t know about you, but my teams always have way too much great content to produce to wait around for anything that impedes the rapid prototyping process.
I say, let the designers create the master styles and set the SME’s free to rapidly storyboard their stuff.
As such, every SME needs to know how to do simple image formatting (crop, resize, outline, drop shadow) and they need an easy to use tool to do it.
Adobe Fireworks (formerly Macromedia — $300 list)
Fireworks is my tool of choice for editing images for the screen (this applies to SME’s as well as multimedia devs). It combines the best of pixel and vector image editing features into a single tool and keeps everything in a layered and fully editable .png file.
With the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia, it’s unclear what Fireworks future will be, given that it inhabits a middle space between the Adobe heavyweights of Photoshop and Illustrator.
For now, it’s still my tool of choice because I think it does the best job of handling this space without being an intimidating tool – again, a very important variable for the SME.
Version Control
Whenever a lot of file collaboration is necessary, version control software becomes imperative. The last thing you every want to do is lose vital pieces of work (which is easy to do if you are passing files around among even a few participants).
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS)
The standalone version of Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is the tool I’ve used most often on my teams. Problem is that it is woefully outdated in it’s standalone form (thought it’s great if everybody is an up to date Visual Studio developer — good luck with SME’s on that).
Microsoft’s standalone product offerings on this have been so lame for so long, that I’m actively looking for an alternate solution. (And, no, Microsoft’s Sharepoint is not a solution for this in my book – it wasn’t built for multimedia files and is more difficult to manage over the long haul than even the old standalone versions of VSS).
Subversion
The tool that has generated the most buzz for standalone version control of late is called Subversion. While I have not used the tool, it (along with some accessories) looks very interesting. (e.g. Tortoise adds Subversion control to Windows via right click menuing in the file explorer).
If I were setting up a new environment, I would definitely take a look at Subversion. Did I mention that it is open source and free?
That’s the short scoop. These recommendations, of course, are all predicated on the supposition that you have a Learning Management System (LMS) and a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) to feed content through.
Feel free to send alternate suggestions in the comments — always interested in hearing about alternate solutions. Continue reading eLearning Software Recommendations for the Subject Matter Expert (SME)…
Cerner Health Conference 2005 Presentation
Posted by bryanzug - 2005/10/11
As promised, here are the files from my panel presentation “Web-Based Training: Effective & Affordable Solutions†from the Cerner Health Conference in Orlando on October 10, 2005.
The PowerPoint File:
http://elearningskinny.com/wp-content/cerner2005zug.ppt
The Flash .exe file demoing the Children’s CIS WBT structure and interaction model. (Intended for 1024×768 screen resolution):
http://elearningskinny.com/wp-content/chc2005bryanzugwbt_demo.exe
ASTD Techknowledge 2005 Presentation: Streamlining WBT Development with Macromedia Captivate and Flash
Posted by bryanzug - 2005/09/20
Here’s the .pdf handout to the ASTD Techknowledge presentation I gave in Las Vegas in February 2005 with my eLearning partner in crime, Karen Hofmann (every good eLearning technical developer needs a really great subject matter expert — and Karen is the Bees Knees).
It’s a case study of the first phase of development of our web based training (WBT) system using Macromedia’s Captivate and Flash toolset. Description from the session is below (along with a link to the ASTD file). Enjoy!
Streamlining WBT Development with Macromedia Captivate and Macromedia Flash at Children’s Hospital Seattle Presented by: Karen Hofmann, Bryan Zug, Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center In this session, participants will explore the use of Captivate and Flash in streamlining software training WBT development. Participants will examine successes and lessons learned by the presenters who are internal content experts and WBT developers at Children’s Hospital Seattle. The session will include a short introduction to Captivate, demonstrations of Captivate to Flash functionality, a look at Children’s WBT development Flash templates, and an overview of the WBT development lifecycle. Learning Objectives:
- Apply the key strengths and weaknesses of Captivate and Flash in the full WBT development lifecycle.
- Use Captivate to support streamlined project deliverable timelines by reducing Flash developer resources required for course production of enterprise-wide WBTs.
- Enable novice, non-technical content experts to efficiently produce technical training content for your own learning audiences.
Sys-Con MX Developer’s Journal Article: Between a Rock and a Soft(ware) Place
Posted by bryanzug - 2005/09/20
Here’s a .pdf of the article I wrote for the March 2005 Edition of MX Developer’s Journal (a Sys-Con publications). It’s called “Between a Rock and a Soft(ware) Place: Streamlining Web-based training development with Captivate & Flash” and is the story from a technical web developer’s perspective.
MXDJ editor, Charles Brown, had some nice things to say about our work in the introduction to the issue, so I’ve included that in the .pdf as well.
I do have to say that I love the fact that they used the exact line I hoped they would use for one of the pullout quotes. It’s one of those that, as I wrote it, I thought to myself, that’ll make a nice pullout quote.
It reads —
When incorrect use of a system can kill people, you tend to be very serious about certifying that everyone using it has demonstrated correct completion of the system tasks that are a part of their jobThat is so cool.
The MXDJ version of the article can be found at —
http://mxdj.sys-con.com/read/48958.htm