LMS Archives – Page 13 of 13 – Creativ Technologies

03 Nov 2020

Blogpost, eLearning creativ technologies 0 comment

Which authoring tool to use for elearning?

Elearning courses have assumed a new role because they can be pursued by learners from any place.

There are no time-bound and place-bound restrictions on them.

Earlier, elearning was done by programmers who used various software to develop such courses. Tools are available in the market such as Elucidat, Captivate, and Storyline. The usage of a tool depends on various factors which include the budget of the elearning company, how easy it is to use a tool, your technical knowledge, whether you are developing the course in a team, or are a sole author?

Popular tools for elearning today

The amount of elearning content that needs to be produced by you also decides the kind of software that is used. Here is a review of some authoring tools for elearning content:

Articulate storyline: It’s preferable for users who like PowerPoint. This is like a more enhanced version. You can create good interactive courses with software because it has triggers to show changes. It can also be used to capture simulations like Captivate. Storyline has options for creating drag-and-drop quizzes, pick one, and pick many kinds of quizzes. The best feature of this software is that you can change the state of an object and then use this state when the user clicks on this object or any other object etc. It also has the option of showing closed options which the reader can access. Although there can be narration, in the course, closed captions are useful for those who have hearing issues.

With storyline, you can create courses customized for mobile phones, etc. The developers don’t need to work extra to create a course for a mobile phone. Storyline has a responsive design feature available so that the course can be shown on different devices.

Elucidat-It aids the business owner in reducing the cost of their important business training. It can be used to create content that can be easily used on mobile phones. It can also be used to customize the layout of your course. Elucidat also has a responsive design feature that creates HTML5 content. This content can be seen on laptops, mobile phones,” and tablets.

Captivate-It can be easily used to produce customised interactions. You can also get quality simulations with this software. It can be used to capture all kinds of movements of a cursor on the screen apart from the activity of the keyboard. Once you include simulations in captivate, they can also include audio narration for the hint captions on how to do a task. You can also include a highlight box to highlight a certain object like an input box captured during a simulation. There can be many kinds of questions and answer interactivities included in Captivate which include True or False, Multiple choice questions, Fill-in-the-blank, and hotspot, etc. There is a customized “results” slide provided in Captivate which can show his score, the number of questions attempted through variables.

The author of the course can easily include drag-and-drop interactions in this course. There can be hints, correct and incorrect captions shown to the user.

So, an author has to choose these tools based on the quality of the elearning output desired.

27 Oct 2015

Blogpost, Design and Development, eLearning, Instructional Designer creativ technologies 3 Comments

Things to Keep in Mind While Developing eLearning Courses

The whole purpose of designing and developing an eLearning course is lost if the audience it is made for chooses to leave it midway. The audience here is the king. If the audience disapproves of an eLearning course, all the efforts and time spent on making the course go to waste. Goes without saying, the key stakeholders are held responsible for the failure of this course. The key stakeholders are SMEs, Instructional designers, multimedia developers, etc.

After putting in all their effort and time, they don’t expect their product (eLearning course) to fare poorly in the market. They expect to receive satisfactory, if not great, reviews from their audience. Disappointed at the reviews they have received, they wish to find out the reason behind this failure. On giving their course a closer look, they find out that the course has certain gaps, and they also understood that they didn’t take some important points into account.

The points that they missed are:

Not clear who the audience is: Before designing, one should be clear about who the audience is. Then the team should work on how to meet the course objective as per the audience.

There was a lack of flow in the course: While designing and developing a course, the entire learning and development team must strive to build a course that is orderly and structured, i.e. in a proper sequence. Although you develop your sequence during the outline phase, you may need to constantly revise it. Make sure you check for the mention of terms and concepts that were not previously defined. If this happens, you’ll need to go back and revise the outline, so learners are introduced to the basics before being moved to the more advanced concepts. Also, the learning course must be developed in a way such that the readers/viewers stay hooked or remain engaged throughout the length of the course.

The course was overloaded with unnecessary and irrelevant information: While developing an eLearning course, we feel that it should be rich in information. In a view to making the course information-rich, we tend to load the course with images, audio, and onscreen text. As a result, the learner finds it difficult to go through the course as there is too much information to process. The course should not be cluttered. We should include visual images, onscreen text, and audio only when it is necessary.

The sentences used were not simple and mostly passive forms of sentences were used: The listener understands the speaker better if they are being addressed directly in the speech. It is always better to say, “He said these words” instead of saying, “These words were said by him.”

It is best to use an active, rather than passive, sentence construction. With an active construction, the subject of the sentence performs an action. With a passive construction, the subject does not take direct action, so the sentence feels weak. So in order to connect better to the audience, the instructional designers/writers should always use active form while structuring content.

03 Aug 2015

Blogpost, eLearning creativ technologies 0 comment

Is there something better than Cloud computing in E-learning?

Readers, my immediate reaction would be No, not yet. Cloud computing is by far the best technology evolved for effective E-learning. The Cloud LMS is an innovative approach that allows learners to access learning material and information anytime and from anywhere. There are several more reasons why the cloud-based system is better than traditional systems and they are:

1. Less Costly: Cloud LMS can be considered as an alternative to minimize cost as this does not require downloading and installing any specific software requirements and personnel for the development and maintenance of this software as all these processes happen in the cloud data center.

2. Enhances Performance: This reduces the need for crash recovery since the data is stored in the cloud. The cloud service provider is responsible for any data crashes.

3. Speedy Updates: Since the e-learning applications are run through the cloud power, the software gets automatically updated in the cloud source. This enables e-learners to get updates instantly.

4. Multiple Devices: A Cloud LMS can be run on multiple devices like smartphones, PCs, and tablets with internet connectivity.

5. Scalability Activity: With the help of the cloud LMS business can adapt according to the rapidly changing environment. This allows businesses to increase or decrease the resources just by adding or removing the number of servers as per the requirement of the businesses.

6. Global Talent Pool: The Cloud LMS allows users a similar experience on any internet connection with minimum software requirements. The same work can be done from multiple geographical locations just by connecting a server to the cloud.

7. Improves Security: In traditional methods, the system crashes result in huge data loss which is a major setback to the business. If the data is saved through cloud computing then it’s a safer option as both the software and the data are located on remote servers that are well protected against security breaches.

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