Learning Technology Products 2009 Report out now

The number of available tools and technologies for online employee training continues to grow each year. Hundreds of content authoring tools, learning management systems, and learning content management systems are currently available.

Brandon Hall Research, providers of information about the tools, technologies, and best practices related to employee training and enterprise learning have just released a comprehensive new report called Learning Technology Products 2009: Authoring Tools, Learning Management Systems, and Learning Content Management Systems.

The number of tools and technologies for online employee training continues to grow; there are literally hundreds of content authoring tools, learning management systems, and learning content management systems currently available for training professionals to use in the operationalization of their organizations' learning and development strategy.

To help you get a sense of what's at hand commercially, Brandon Hall's 526-page report provides one- to three-page profiles of more than 250 learning technology products. And, best of all, this report available for free, gratis.

This report contains profiles of the products featured in three Brandon Hall Research KnowledgeBases:

Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase
This online resource contains 20 to 30-page profiles of 100+ tools used to create almost any type of online learning content, including courses, games, presentations, and tests. The Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase provides case studies and success stories that show how high-profile corporate, educational, and governmental organizations have completed their authoring tool selection processes.

Each authoring tool is profiled extensively and provides information on standards, rapid development capabilities, assessment capabilities, language and localization features, simulation capabilities, etc. – all the details you need to find extensible and flexible authoring tools to help you create superior e-learning content.

LMS KnowledgeBase
Containing 40-60 page profiles of 92 systems, the new 2009 edition of the LMS KnowledgeBase is the most comprehensive resource available to help you compare learning management systems and select the system that best meets your needs.

The depth and breadth of this research makes it a valuable resource to practitioners, CLOs, IT staff members, and other key stakeholders. The cost of the research is easily justified in that it helps you avoid costly mistakes and ensures an efficient LMS selection process.

LCMS KnowledgeBase
A learning content management system (LCMS) can elevate your content creation to a new level. An LCMS stores your content as small bits of information that can be modified and reassembled as needed. These systems also act as single-source authoring platforms that can output content to many different formats.

This online resource contains profiles of 38 of the best systems. If you are planning to harness the power and flexibility of an LCMS, this research is the way to go about it. It can help you understand all the details that go into choosing the right LCMS for your organization.

Why is this report free?
According to Brandon Hall, this report contains a few half- and full-page ads. Support from advertisers allows them to publish this report free of charge. In my view, this free report should become part of your resource toolkit to assist learning professionals select the appropriate technology for organizational learning initiatives.

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Upload Adobe Presenter content to a Learning Management System (LMS) – more

Further my recent post on Adding E-Learning Presentations to Blackboard, Brian S Friedlander was kind enough to comment on my post. He suggested that you could import e-learning presentations and courseware to LMSs like Blackboard as PDFs.

Figure 1. Presenter 7 Publish dialog box

Sure enough, Adobe Presenter 7 does have a ‘Publish to PDF’ output option (see Figure 1), accompanying the ‘Publish to My Computer’ and ‘Publish to Connect Pro’ rendering options available with the previous versions of Presenter (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Presenter 6 Publish dialog box

Having only just installed Presenter 7, and while I have published some test presentations locally, I have yet to upload any PDF-formatted content to an LMS. So, I have no idea how well this output type functions in comparison to the more traditional XML, SWF, and HTML-formatted e-learning content package when it’s deployed from an online or networked platform.

I will carry out one of my famous comparisons between the two formats at some point in the future. My preliminary view is that the ability to distribute content as a PDF certainly opens up some interesting possibilities and opportunities.

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References:

Adobe Presenter 7 Homepage: http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/

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Adding E-Learning Presentations to Blackboard

Today’s Question: how do you turn this:

in to this?

You have to read the blog post to find out.

Now read on…

If you’ve read The E-Learning Curve Blog recently, you’ll know that I have been creating quite a number of demos over the last seven weeks or so. Undertaking this activity has inspired me to write about some “back to basics” e-learning topics (including my recent evaluation of Camtasia and Captivate), and today I’m going to address the question “OK, I have my content, how do I upload it to an LMS?”

But first a (sort of) digression…

I facilitated a conference on Third-Level Distance Education and E-learning in late 2008. We covered many topics during the proceedings, including

• Online Teaching and Learning
• The Economics of E-Learning
• Assessment in On-line Education
• Impact of E-learning

Now don’t get me wrong – all of the above are highly interesting and useful topics, and I’ll talk ‘til the cows come home on any or all of them. My favorite part of these events however, is where I introduce and guide the audience through some hands-on e-learning content generation using any one of a number of content authoring tools.

To show (sometimes skeptical) participants just how easy it is to do this, I present a two-hour workshop called How to Create E-learning in Just Four Mouse Clicks (‘Four Clicks’ for short, in honor of the similarly-named Led Zeppelin song) …and as this is the digression I’m not going to elaborate any further on the Four Clicks workshop.

So digression over: once you have your e-learning content, what next? Well, you can always play it from your PC or Mac of course, but what you really need to do is load it into an environment where the audience can access it, which means placing the content on a Learning Management System (LMS) like one of the flavors of Blackboard.

Uploading content to an LMS is easy, but it’s not intuitive. Computers are obvious and logical. The logical and obvious approach is to pick through all of the ShockWave Flash (SWF) files, find the largest one (because that contains the content – right?) and use the Browse feature of your LMS to upload the content.

This inevitably ends in failure, because there’s more to distributing learning materials online that just the content (I’ll talk about IMS manifests, specifications and metadata in the future). In fact, the process is quite straight-forward, and I could outline the steps here – that was the original intent of today’s post, but on reflection, I considered that it would probably be more useful if I created a PDF “How To” guide that you could download and keep close in your “My Useful E-Learning Stuff” directory on your local drive, to pull out when you need it, rather than trying to find the instructions buried in a blog entry.

For the purposes of this document, the presentation is created in Adobe Presenter, and was uploaded to Blackboard, but the process is common across most authoring tools and delivery platforms.

Click here to open the Adding Adobe Presenter presentations to Blackboard PDF (requires Adobe Reader).

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End-of-year Moodle-ings: a chance to review (a book)

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of the E-Learning Curve Blog, I strongly advocate the Constructivist approach to learning, and the use of open-source technologies to develop and distribute e-learning materials. You’ll also know that my Learning Management System of choice is Martin Dougiamas’ Modular Object-Orientated Learning Environment (Moodle), as this particular platform tick both those boxes.

As we come to the end of 2008, I have finally gotten around to do begin undertaking some essential housekeeping tasks on my website, michaelhanley.ie.

Among those activities is a long-overdue upgrade to Moodle 1.9 - I’ve been itching to get an opportunity to investigate and use these new features and enhancements:

• Social networking functionality (i.e. tagging)
• The user blogs facility
• The improved wiki

And most especially:

• Learning Outcomes

The enhanced backup and restore features and new DB module will also assist management of my implementation, as I’m the kind of person who feels like they’re performing open heart surgery – without anesthetic - on a patient, on those occasions when I have to perform some sort of customization on a production system.

By coincidence Packt Publishing recently contacted me and asked me to review Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development, by William Rice IV. The publishers describe the text as:

A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery and using the best educational practices. …Moodle E-Learning Course Development shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance teaching.

In my view there are certain publishers – Packt, Friends of Ed, O’Reilly and so on, who can generally be trusted to provide hands-on expertise for IT professionals, so I already own a couple of Packt’s texts. But before I hear you shout “Canyonero!” I will undertake to review this text on it’s own merits, in an equitable manner. There’s no point in me saying that this book meets the needs of its potential audience if it doesn’t.

Since my reviewer’s copy of the text just arrived in the post today, I’ll be taking the opportunity to review the book in the very near future, so watch this space.

In the meantime if you’d like to take a look at the book yourself, Packt Publishing have given me Chapter 6, “Adding Interactive Course Material” as a 3.4MB PDF for you download.

• Click here to download the PDF from my website michaelhanley.ie

or

• click here to get the chapter from Packt Publishing.com

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References:

Rice, W.H. (2008) Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development Available online: http://www.packtpub.com/

Wikipedia contributors, The Last Temptation of Krust. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, [Internet] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyonero [Accessed December 12, 2008]

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