Open Source E-Learning 4: KompoZer Web Editor

E-learning is intimately bound to IT networks and to the World Wide Web. At their heart, many e-learning courses are just specialized websites, and most are created with some input from a website authoring tool. Website authoring tools are applications to build and link individual web pages to create a website.

Website authoring tools are not stand-alone applications; their purpose is to create design content to be distributed to learners via web servers. Website authoring tools are also reliant on media editors for the graphics, animations, audio, video and other media integrated into courseware.

Today's open source e-learning toolkit component is a website authoring tool called KompoZer.

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs. The application is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-specialist users who just want to create an attractive professional-looking website without needing to know HTML or web coding (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. KompoZer User Interface
[Click to Enlarge]

According to KompoZer's developers, the application supports:

• WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
• Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your website and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
• Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
• Navigate between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
• Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
• Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
• An easy-to-use, web authoring system for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh.

Key Features and Capabilities
FTP site manager	All the sites you specify in your Publishing Settings become navigable in a sidebar. KompoZer supports an MS Explorer-style site tree view, or a directory-only view. It is also possible to filter / show all files, HTML documents only, or image files only.
Color Picker	KompoZer has an extended color picker. Colors can be set from the RGB, hue, saturation, and brightness choosers.
Tabs	Have one window only on your screen and edit several documents at once, each document having its own Undo/Redo stack! Just glance at the tabs to know if a document needs to be saved or not.
CSS Editor	Create style sheets easily and manage the styles attached to your documents. You can see your style settings applied '"live" to the document you're editing.
Styles Properties	KompoZer allows you to right-click on any element in the hierarchical toolbar at the bottom of the window and directly set its style properties.
Customizable Toolbars	Customize your toolbar and show only the buttons you want/need.
Forms	Use a XUL-based UI to edit all your forms, and edit all your form elements.
Cleaner Markup	KompoZer contains functionality to clean up redundant tags and to call W3C's HTML validator from within KompoZer.
XFN	When you create a new link to an external resource, or when you edit an existing link, you can now add XHTML Friends Network information to say that the owner of that resource is someone you know and trust.
Visible Editing/Layout Marks	In a complex page layout, you often need to see visible carriage returns and block borders. KompoZer can now do that for you. And of course, everything is controlled by a CSS style sheet so you can customize those marks and replace them with your own.
Table/Cell Resizing Rulers	Enable you to adjust the size of rows and columns in any table in the web page you design.
Automated Spellchecker	The integrated in-line spellchecker will underline all misspelled words as you type to ensure correct spelling throughout the entire web page.

Click here to download KompoZer.

More…

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Get the Best from Techsmith Camtasia Content Rendering, Part 1

You've created your Camtasia e-learning masterpiece.

It's a well-designed, perfectly executed, fully-featured lesson set that meets all of your learners' needs. Now you need to get it to the people. But hold on! You've used one of the preset Camtasia production settings, and the output that you get on the screen doesn't match your expectations.

It's an unpleasant surprise.

You feel all your hard work has been for nothing. What's worse, the clock is running, and you've assured your customer that their training materials is "Fantastic! No, really. It's amazing. You'll be really pleased."

This is a relatively common situation e-learning developers encounter (according to people who have contacted me on this subject) so in my view, it's worth exploring a little further: why does this occur, how can it be overcome, and how can it be prevented from happening in future projects?

The underlying reason for poorly-rendered content typically manifests itself long before a content developer clicks on the Camtasia Production Wizard 'Finish' button. To understand the reason, we have to look at the context: we must begin with Rapid E-Learning as an approach to developing courseware, and we must look at Camtasia as an authoring tool.

An overview of Rapid E-Learning

Traditional learning content development methods (see Figure 1) involve using subject matter experts (SMEs) working with instructional designer who, in turn, designs a learning intervention. A digital media development team then builds the interactive solution based on this design. The quality assurance team evaluates the solution against the design and test plan. This "waterfall" approach to content production can lead to long and costly design and development cycles, which can reduce the effectiveness of material with critical timelines or where content regularly changes or is updated.

Figure 1 Traditional E-Learning Content Development Model
[Click to enlarge]

Rapid E-Learning (REL) takes a different approach. While the definition of rapid e-learning differs among experts, generally it’s considered to be e-learning that can be developed quickly and inexpensively. REL uses tools and processes that decrease development time dramatically. Traditional courseware development timelines are measured in terms of months whereas REL timelines are measured in terms of days and weeks. This makes it an attractive solution for many companies. This can be a time-consuming process, even if a project runs on-time, with a minimum number of contributors (see Table 1).

Table 1 Production Logistics

Team Size:	10 people
Minimum Development Time:	14 Weeks
Maximum Development Time:	18 Weeks

In contrast, the Rapid E-Learning Approach can be defined as

the process of developing content quickly and inexpensively. REL uses tools and processes that decrease development time dramatically. Traditional courseware development timelines are measured in terms of months whereas REL timelines are measured in terms of days and weeks.

(Archibald, D. 2005)

Jennifer de Vries sees e-learning as being

...like the desktop publishing industry of 20 years ago, when desktop publishing was relegated to the one person with the big computer who knew the specialized software and laid out all of the documents. Then MS Word came along and it included many desktop publishing features, giving everyone the ability to create reasonably attractive material on a PC using this very simple software. I think rapid e-learning tools are going to transform the e-learning industry in much the same way, so that e-learning development will become more accessible to the general public.

(Fournier, J. 2005)

In essence, her opinion (which is one that I share), is that the tools used to create e-learning are at a point where they are on the cusp of a tipping point and become much more commonly used.

Figure 2. Where Rapid E-Learning Fits
[Click to enlarge]

These tools - Camtasia among them - are known as programming-free authoring tools. They are typically (though not exclusively) built for non-technical authors that don't have programming skills. These systems are often template- or form-based and are very easy to learn and use. They are very efficient and productive tools if you need to quickly enable subject-matter experts and training professionals to develop e-learning content without knowing a programming language.

More...
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References:

Archibald, D. (2005). Rapid E-learning: A growing trend. Learning Circuits Magazine. [Internet] Available from: http://www.astd.org/lc Subscription required. Accessed 14th July 2006

Fournier, J. (2006). Rapid E-Learning Grows Up. Learning Circuits Magazine. [Internet] Available from: http://www.astd.org/LC/2006/1206_fournier.htm Accessed 20th July 2009

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Rapid E-Learning Production - Supporting Applications

As we know, Rapid E-Learning is subject matter expert-centric, based on authoring or developing content with easy-to-use, ubiquitous platforms like PowerPoint & Flash, and enables content to be developed in a matter of days, not than weeks or months. Rapid e-learning does not mean taking liberties with well-established content development processes.

Rather, it is an approach to content development that enables SMEs to author content quickly and efficiently, typically using learning professionals as coaches and assistants in the process.

The two tenets of rapid e-learning are:

1. Ease of development
2. Short development time frames

The key to successful rapid e-learning is having tools and templates that make it easy for practically any expert to quickly create effective learning materials.

However, rapid content authoring is only part of the story. The end-to-end content design, development, delivery, management and maintenance cycle demands a broad range of skills (I talked about some of these here), and a number of computer applications to support and leverage these steps of the e-learning development process.

In my never-ending pursuit of enhancing performance when using the Rapid E-Learning methodology, I regularly assess new applications, tools, and utilities to assess their value in my learning and development content production procedures. Here are the applications I’m going to evaluate over the next few months. Of course, I’ll blog my views on them over that period of time. Interestingly, only a few of these apps are 'pure' e-learning development tools; the others I intend to use to facilitate aspects of the content development process, rather than to actually develop learning materials.

Serena Prototype Composer 2009
Serena Prototype Composer is an application planning, modeling and prototyping environment for non-technical users to visually define their application needs, including business processes, activities, user interfaces, requirements, and data. Models can be derived from existing resources such as Web applications and can be published as running prototypes as well as Microsoft Word specifications.

WebCAT
The Web Category Analysis Tool is an open source utility that allows designers and usability engineer to test a proposed or existing website or CMS/LMS ontology or categorization scheme. This enables knowledge managers (and instructional designers) to determine how well taxonomies, categories and learning content objects are understood by users. WebCAT is a variation on the traditional card sorting paradigm, where users are guided to generate a category tree or even a folksonomy.

Stanza Desktop
Stanza Desktop is an e-book publishing tool, designed for generate digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general Web content for a range of hardware platforms. It supports HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major e-book standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum's new EPUB Open eBook standard. According to the developers, Stanza is designed to to make reading on your Macintosh, PC or mobile device an “enjoyable and hassle-free” experience.

iWebkit
iWebKit is a GNU-licensed file package and content framework designed to enable those without the time or the programming skills to use the iPhone SDK to create iPhone and iPod Touch compatible websites and webapps. According to the developers, the kit is accessible to anyone - even people without any html knowledge. and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. We’ll see.

Microsoft Learning Content Development System
The Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is a free-to-use tool that enables the developers to create interactive, online courses. The LCDS allows anyone to publish e-learning courses by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactive activities, quizzes, games, assessments, animations, demos, and other multimedia.

PowerManual
PowerManual addresses the needs of presenters, trainers and anyone who uses PowerPoint on a regular basis. PowerManual enables you to produce high quality documents in a range of formats, including Word, PDF and HTML.PowerManual enables the creation of cover pages, logos, custom headers and footers, document pagination, on-the-fly slide updating, as well as PowerPoint slidestack management.

As I said, I'll be reviewing the apps, testing and reporting on their functionality, ease-of-use, suitability of purpose, adaptability to e-learning, and so on. I’d like to hear your opinions: do you already use some or all of these tools? What do you think of them? Are you going to evaluate them yourself, based on my suggestion? Are there any other tools in the same space that are more effective?

Let me know what you think by commenting in the space below.

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Using Media to Engage the Learner: Blatant Plug

Today's the day for my eLearning Guild Online Forum debut presentation. At 10:15am Pacific Time I'll be hosting an online session (via Adobe Connect) called Integrating Audio in to E-Learning Courseware.
As a teaser, here my session outline:

This session will cover:

• Why use audio in e-learning?
• Using non-linear editing tools
• How to record audio
• How to produce audio
• How to integrate audio into commonly-used rapid e-learning applications

Here's the agenda for the full two days of the Lights, Camera, Action: Using Media to Engage the Learner event.

Opening General Session
Thursday, June 4 — 8:30a to 9:45a

• Selecting Media for Learning: Thinking Inside and Outside the Box
  • Patti Shank, Learning Peaks LLC

Concurrent Session Block 2
Thursday, June 4 — 10:15a to 11:30a

• 201 | Integrating Audio into E-Learning Courseware
  • Michael Hanley, Cúram Software, Ltd.
• 202 | Rich Media on a Poor Budget
  • Jeff Tillett, T-Mobile

Concurrent Session Block 3
Thursday, June 4 — 12:00n to 1:15p

• 301 | Finding, Hiring, and Directing e-Learning Voices
  • Harlan Hogan, E-learningvoices.com
• 302 | Rapid Video and User Generated Video
  • Mark Chrisman, T-Mobile

Concurrent Session Block 4
Friday, June 5 — 8:30a to 9:45a

401 | Creating Interactive Learning Experiences With Video in Flash

John Crider, Intuit, Inc

402 | Storytorials: An Instructional Strategy for e-Learning

Kevin Cassel, James Kinnamon & Pete Safran, SAI Global

Concurrent Session Block 5
Friday, June 5 — 10:15a to 11:30a

• 501 | Sometimes a Video Isn't Just a Video
  • Stephen Haskin, S Media
• 502 | Immersive Simulations that use Voice Technologies
  • Paul Howe, Allen Interactions

Closing General Session
Friday, June 5 — 12:00n to 1:15p

• Cool Tools: Spice Up Your Training with Web 2.0 – Legally
  • Michelle Lentz, Write Technology

If you're participating, I hope to see you there (metaphorically speaking), and best of luck to all presenters as well as the backroom team of organizers and moderators who have worked so hard to make this event happen.

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Integrating Audio into E-Learning Courseware: eLearning Guild Online Forum

The eLearning Guild's next Online Forum taking place on June 4th & 5th is called Lights, Camera, Action: Using Media to Engage the Learner.

Here's what the Forum will cover:

It wasn’t long ago that e-Learning developers thought that putting a simple Flash animation and a small sound file into their e-Learning offerings was really leading-edge stuff. But today much more advanced technology, like higher bandwidth, gaming, and immersive learning techniques, is easily available. And, ever-more-sophisticated learners, who are demanding more effective and absorbing e-Learning programs, are pushing for adoption of advanced media techniques.

This Online Forum will show you how to use audio, video, animation, and other technologies to enhance the engagement and “stickyness” of your e-Learning offerings. You’ll see real-life examples, and learn various design approaches for effectively using media. This Online Forum is your best chance to focus on improving the e-Learning you create for your organization, and to...

• EXPLORE how using different media tools and processes can enhance your e-Learning offerings,
• DISCOVER how better use of media enhances a wide variety of topics and formats,
• EXAMINE the design and development of media-use techniques to achieve specific goals,
• LEARN how other organizations are using media to build engagement into their e-Learning programs, and
• ENSURE that your e-Learning meets both your learners’ and your organizations’ goals.

I'm pleased to announce that I will be presenting the Forum session on using audio in e-learning. Called Integrating Audio into E-Learning Courseware, session participants will learn the audio production lifecycle, see examples and demonstrations, and get hints, tips, and tricks-of-the-trade to enable you to produce high-quality audio for your courseware. You’ll learn how recording subject matter experts as they describe a process, task, or activity, when well-recorded and produced can, in most cases, be integrated into courseware without taking the extra steps of hiring a professional voice-over artist to re-record the narration. This can lead to considerable savings in time and money, as well as reduce the time-to-market of courseware.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why use audio in e-Learning?
• The uses of non-linear editing tools
• How to record audio
• How to produce audio
• How to integrate audio into commonly-used rapid e-Learning applications and podcasts

When learning with multimedia, research shows that visual imagery is better retained when accompanied by verbal information; that learners are better able to integrate information via multi-modal instruction. Called the Six Principles of Learning, it describes how information encoded and transmitted using both visual and auditory channels reduces the cognitive load on the learner, so their working memory can process information more effectively.

However, most e-learning professionals perceive that creating and integrating high-quality audio is a highly-specialized activity outside of their expertise. But now more than ever, e-learning technology and content production skills are a key requirement for learning professionals who wish to interact with their audience.

So join me on Thursday by clicking here to register for the event. if you haven't already registered, I'll be delighted to see you there.

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Camtasia Lab – create a short learning object

I’m on leave for a few weeks, so I decided that I better leave you some homework to keep you occupied in my absence.

Objective
The objective of this assignment is to create a short e-learning module based upon a PowerPoint presentation. Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to convert a PowerPoint presentation into a Web-deliverable format.

The demo must contain slides, animation, graphics, transport controls and a progress bar. In the ‘Things to Try Yourself’ section of the tutorial, there are some guidelines about how to add audio narration to your learning object.

Format
The published learning object must be a Flash movie (FLV or SWF) file, and the file must be able to play back in a standard Web browser such as Internet Explorer, Opera or Mozilla Firefox.

Lab Structure

• Task Breakdown 1
• Task Breakdown 2
• Recording your presentation
• Edit your content
• Publishing your content
• Some things to try yourself
• Conclusion
• References / Sources

Click here to download the PDF of the tutorial.

Hopefully this assignment will keep you occupied in my absence, so I would like to wish you a happy Easter / Spring break, and I’ll talk you in May.

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Shooting Video for E-Learning Use – eLearning Guild

I recently posted on integrating audio with e-learning authoring tools, and in the near future, I’ll be covering some aspects of the visual aspects of creating e-learning content, focusing on creating video for application demonstrations and using still imagery in e-learning.

In the meantime, the eLearning Guild have just published an informative primer called Making a Demonstration Video for E-Learning Use.

The article in Learning Solutions e-Magazine discusses a favorite of mine: straight-forward ‘How-to’ video demonstrations. The authors, Steve Haskin and Tim Martin describe this learning modality:

“How-to” instruction is an important training modality; in fact, “learning how to do things” is the cornerstone of being human. Our lives are spent learning how to do things, and this doesn’t stop simply because we “learn” in the workplace or even when we slip the “e-” in front of learning.

(p.2)

In this context then, tasks and activities can be elucidated using a number of video based approaches including:

• Sequenced still images
• Video
• 3-D animation

Video photography is basically light captured on a medium like film, video tape, or DVD. However, lighting a subject properly is something of a black art and if done poorly will undermine the learners’ ability to interact with the subject matter. The article’s authors discuss the basics of lighting in reasonably good detail, including key-, fill-, and back lighting, as well as color temperature, and new lighting technologies like fluorescent and LED light types.

They go on to describe the importance of a good tripod, and what you should look for in a video camera. I would agree with their assertion that HD cameras “are complete overkill” (p.7) and in fact that good old reliable MiniDV digital tape is still the best video media choice for e-learning practitioners – your content is captured as uncompressed DV-AVI video (so it can be edited and rendered in either NTSC or PAL as well as in various compressed formats), and MiniDV is a great archive format.

The authors conclude by discussing the pros and cons of various video codecs, their benefits and disadvantages.

Video can seem technical, overly-involved, and even intimidating to the novice videographer: I suggest that you have a look at the article if you want a good introduction to video for e-learning and if you want to know your blondes from your redheads. (They’re types of light: I wasn’t being rude!)

______________

References:

Haskin, S., Martin, T. (2009) Making a Demonstration Video for E-Learning Use. Learning Solutions e-Magazine [Internet] Available from: http://www.elearningguild.com/articles/abstracts/index.cfm?id=302&action=viewonly Accessed 30 March 2009

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Adding Audio to Adobe Captivate

Today's post covers importing and synchronizing audio with markers into Adobe Captivate. This is the third and final part of a short series inspired a question submitted by a subscriber to the E-Learning Curve Blog.

I’m pleased to see that this series about integrating sound and narration into rapid e-learning authoring environments is being so positively viewed, and hopefully my suggestions are being folded in to your workflows as you create e-learning content for your audience. But firstly, why use audio at all?

The Science Bit

According to Colvin Clark & Mayer (2002) there are six different "broadly applicable" media element guidelines to follow when undertaking e-learning instruction. These guidelines are:

1. The Multimedia Principle: Use words and graphics rather than words alone.
2. The Contiguity Principle: Place corresponding words and graphics near each other
3. The Modality Principle: Present words as audio narration rather than onscreen text.
4. The Redundancy Principle: Presenting words in both text and audio narration can hurt learning.
5. The Coherence Principle: Adding interesting material can hurt learning
6. The Personalization Principle: Use conversational style and virtual coaches.

The Modality principle

When learning with multimedia the brain must simultaneously encode two different types of information, an auditory stimulus and a visual stimulus. These two sources of information do not overwhelm or cognitively overload the learner's capacity to acquire information. Rather, psychological research has shown that verbal information is in fact better remembered when accompanied by a visual image.

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed a theory of working memory which hypothesized two largely independent subcomponents that tend to work in parallel - one visual and one verbal/acoustic. As we know from everyday life, we can simultaneously process information from our eyes and ears; replicating this phenomenon in an educational context can be beneficial for learners.

This dual-coding theory, first proposed by Paivio (1971) was applied to multimedia and e-learning by Richard E. Mayer and his associates. Mayer has demonstrated (2002, 2004) that learners are better able to integrate information via multimodal instruction. In a number of studies, Mayer and his colleagues tested Paivio’s dual-coding theory using multiple media channels. They found that students learning via multimedia (animation and narration) consistently did better on transfer questions than those who learned from animation and text-based materials. That is, they (the learners) were significantly better when it came to applying what they had learned via multiple media channels, rather than unimedia (visual only) instruction.

While instructional content using multimedia learning was initially limited to logical and scientific processes that centered on cause-and-effect systems, over time it was found that the modality effect could be extended to other educational domains.

Information can and (should even) be encoded and transmitted using both visual and auditory (narration) channels. If verbal information is encoded auditorily it reduces the cognitive load of the learner. Consequently their working memory can process information more effectively. Mayer has calls this the the Modality Principle.

Adding audio to Adobe Captivate projects
Adobe Captivate, like a range of e-learning authoring environments enables you to leverage the Modality Principle by adding narration, music, wildtrack sound, and almost any other sound to learning content to enhance learning. For example, you can:

• Add a background track that plays for the duration of the project.
• Add sound to an individual slide.
• Add sound to a specific object, such as a caption, click box, highlight box, or button

Getting Started
For a refresher on creating markers in an audio editor click here. In sound editing, an audio file REGION specifies a segment of audio data which (in the context of e-learning) can be narration - a word, a phrase, a sentence, or some other meaningful unit of information. Regions are of variable length and usually align to the duration of the instructional event they are associated with. Audio editors like Sound Forge enable you to divide a sound file into different regions with specific start and end points (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Regions in Sound Forge

Unlike Presenter, Captivate cannot read markers, so to import audio into the application, you must first process the audio file so that it can be readily added to each component of your e-learning content by extracting smaller sound files from the master file (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Extracted Regions

Once extracted, the files are ready to be imported into Captivate. At this point in the process, I expected to be able to add the folder containing my extracted files to Captivate 4. However, this happened:

... so the rest of this process was completed in Captivate 2.

Note: I attempted a range of activities to work around the error message - I won't bore you with the details here - but I had no success in circumventing the issue. Not good. For Adobe Captivate.

Without the facility to import the files via the library feature in Captivate 4, I reverted to the process of manually importing each audio file as prescribed in Captivate 2 (see demo, below). While this is a tedious process, it is still much faster than recording and editing content directly into Captivate, for the simple reason that Captivate is a content authoring tool, not a dedicated audio editor.

I read somewhere recently that if you walk around with a hammer, pretty soon everything looks like a nail; when creating e-learning content it's very much a case of using the right tool for the right job to save yourself time and effort.

You Try:

To create and extract regions in Sound Forge:

Open Sound Forge. From the File menu, select Open… -> [yourFile.wav]

Ensure the file’s audio markers are preserved as intended from last time.

Now, from the Special menu, choose Regions List -> Markers to Regions.

All existing markers will be converted to regions using the data between each consecutive marker as the region boundary. For example, if your file contains three markers, this command will create two regions; the first region will span the area between the first and second markers, and the second region will span the area between the second and third markers.

Next, from the Tools menu, choose Extract Regions to create new files from regions in the Regions List.

The regions will be extracted to a directory on your computer.

E-Learning Curve Blog Demonstration: Adding Audio to Adobe Captivate

Next time: Back to mobile learning. Delivering e-learning via a range of instructional modalities using m-learning.

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References:

Baddeley, A.D.; G.J. Hitch (1974), "Working Memory", in Bower, G.A., The psychology of learning and motivation: advances in research and theory, 8, New York: Academic Press, pp. 47-89

Colvin Clark, R. Mayer, R. E. (2002). e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. Pfieffer.

Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia learning. New York: Cambridge University Press

Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

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