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eLearning: Cloud Review and Collaboration with ReviewLink

by Stephanie Ivec  

One of the biggest hidden challenges when it comes to developing eLearning is getting feedback from your client, collaborating on course content with internal team members, or getting final project approval.

 

Sure, you can manage the collaboration or feedback process the old fashioned way--email. However, managing dozens upon dozens of project emails can quickly become a daunting task. Even if you're successful in managing the email strings, if your boss or client asks you to summarize the comments that were approved or rejected, re-reading the emails is likely going to be next to impossible.

 

One possible solution to this conundrum is ReviewLink, an online tool that lets eLearning developers host published courses and manage feedback--all in one place. Best of all: you can use ReviewLink with Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, or Lectora.

 

Work More Efficiently

Your manager, stakeholders, and subject matter experts can provide feedback directly on any page of a course. Each comment has a status--New, Fixed, OK, Not OK, or Archived--so you can easily keep track of your progress.

 

Thanks to ReviewLink, one company (Axcess Financial) reports saving 80 maintenance hours each year and trimming 12 weeks off of the review process. 

 

According to an Axcess Financial rep, "ReviewLink's cloud-based collaboration and easy content management contributed to a high level of efficiency, reduction in errors, and hours of time saved."

Above and beyond the review and collaboration time savings, ReviewLink can also also be used for beta testing with small groups of learners. For instance, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used ReviewLink to run a course pilot. By using ReviewLink, the CDC allowed multiple reviewers to share their opinions while keeping their comments hidden from each other. This prevented one reviewer's opinion from influencing another's first impression of the course.

How Do You Get There From Here?

As I mentioned above, you can use ReviewLink with Lectora, Storyline, or Captivate projects. If you are using Lectora, you can upload directly to ReviewLink from within the tool. Storyline and Captivate developers need to first publish the content and then upload the content into ReviewLink.

 

In Storyline, simply publish courses to the web with the Include HTML5 Output selected. When publishing, select ZIP.

 

In Captivate, turn off Quiz Reporting when publishing. When publishing, select Zip Files.

 

Once you have published your course content, login to ReviewLink and follow these steps to upload the content:

 

Next Time: The ReviewLink workflow.

***

You can download a free trial of ReviewLink here. Normally the review period lasts for 30 days. However, if you sign up for the ReviewLink trial now, you will receive an extra 30 days for free.

Moving Classroom Training to eLearning

by Jennie Ruby 

 

When information needs to be moved to a new medium, we have a tendency to try to make the new medium fit the mold of the old. When the Internet was in its early days, websites would often look just like a document: whole paragraphs of text with headings, filling the screen from side to side. But soon we realized that reading on the screen was ineffective, and we learned that a good website chunks the material and uses a series of hierarchical hyperlinks to get us to the exact information we need. 

 

The same is true with eLearning. eLearning is not just an online representation of what we would do in the classroom. It's a paradigm shift. It's a new way of presenting ideas in a way that is observable and learnable in a short time on one's own. Because an adult learner has a limited amount of attention to devote to eLearning, the language and the images need to engage and involve the learner. 

 

The voiceover script of eLearning cannot have the dense layers of meaning and abstract terminology typically used in academic text meant to be read. Instead we need to use plain language, short sentences, and a proportional ratio of text to imagery. 

 

And the methods used in eLearning cannot be the same as classroom methods: lecture, note-taking, discussion.

 

That does not mean that eLearning cannot convey complex ideas and enable adults to achieve learning at a high-level on Bloom's taxonomy. But it does mean that we need to break the ideas down in some new ways, provide interactivity to help learners apply the effort needed to learn the material, and supply knowledge-check evaluations to allow learners to gain confidence in synthesizing and applying the concepts.

 

Even if the audience for an eLearning lesson is individuals with PhDs, text with a high grade-level is not appropriate for an audio voice over. It will come across as a lecture, and adults in the business world will have a hard time holding their focus on it and absorbing it. It will go by the wayside somewhere between email and the next business meeting.

 

The problem is not the difficulty of the content of high-grade-level text, but its density. Too much meaning per word, too many words per sentence, and too many sentences per visual element creates a challenge for an adult engaging with eLearning.

 

In the eLearning world, information, knowledge, and analytical skills need to be broken down into less-dense units and taught in a new and different way. By trying to stick closely with live classroom paradigms for eLearning, we risk having it fail.

 

And if it fails, it is not because eLearning cannot convey complex concepts. It is because of the failure to present the content using the methodology of eLearning.

 

What are your thoughts on this subject? Feel free to post your comments below.

Articulate Storyline vs. Adobe Captivate

A recent LinkedIn post asked eLearning developers: which tool is best: Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline? As I read through the comments, I was struck by how many people insisted that Storyline was the better choice because it was easier to learn than Captivate because it was so much like Microsoft PowerPoint.

 

As someone who uses both Captivate and Storyline, I have to disagree with that recurring sentiment. Sure, Storyline seems to be more like PowerPoint (there's a similar Ribbon and toolset). But honestly, how many of you are PowerPoint experts? I bet you can make a traditional presentation in PowerPoint including text, bullets, and images, but do you really know how to use PowerPoint efficiently and to its potential? I would submit that the answer is no... unless you received proper PowerPoint training. Both Captivate and Storyline seem simple at first glance... just like PowerPoint. However, PowerPoint, Storyline, and Captivate are robust development tools and if you aren't trained, you'll quickly find yourself doing the "hunt and peck" shuffle as you learn on-the-fly... spending double (perhaps triple) the time necessary to perform simple tasks.

 

I'm a big fan of both Captivate and Storyline (and TechSmith Camtasia Studio too). I'm constantly asked which tool is best (typically this question comes from new eLearning developers who are under pressure to pick one tool for their corporate eLearning initiatives over another). People want to know the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each tool.

 

My answer? It depends mainly on two things: your budget to purchase an eLearning tool (are you a one-person shop buying a single license or are you part of a team requiring multiple licenses?); and the output you are trying to provide your learners.

 

Captivate costs around $1,000. If you don't want to shell out the cash up front, you can subscribe to Captivate for around $30 per month. Given that Adobe upgrades Captivate approximately once each year, and you get the upgrades for free as part of your subscription, subscribing is a pretty good deal. Storyline is far more expensive (I've seen it listed for upwards of $2,000 and there isn't a subscription plan).

 

When it comes to output, both Captivate and Storyline can publish SWF and HTML5 content. However, if you're required to publish interactive PDFs or create responsive eLearning, the choice has to be Captivate (Storyline does not currently support either output).

 

Here's an analogy for comparing Captivate against Storyline. Consider the Toyota Tundra to the Toyota Takoma. Both are trucks. Both are awesome. Both have similar appointments in the cabin (some of the appointments are identical and if you learn how to use a feature in one truck, you know how to use it in the other). The Tundra (Captivate) can tow a house; the Takoma (Storyline) can tow a boat. The Takoma is easier to park in a small garage; the Tundra... not so much.

 

Do you need to tow a house or just a boat? If just a boat, go ahead and get the boat-puller. However, once you've purchased the boat puller and then need to pull a house... yikes!

 

If you use both Captivate and Storyline, I'd love to read your comments about both tools below as comments.

 

And of course, no matter which tool you choose, we've got an awesome collection of training classes to support you.

Development Corner: Image Formats

by Sally Cox  

When it comes to adding images to websites, PowerPoint presentations, or eLearning projects, you will likely be given JPEGs, GIFs, or PNGs. Let's review the three most common image formats and why/when to use them.

JPEG

JPEG is short for "Joint Photographer's Experts Group." It is one of the most popular formats used on the web and in eLearning. JPEG compression (the act of making the image as small as possible while retaining as much quality as possible) is "lossy" compression, which means every time you save an image as a JPEG, it loses quality.

 

The first image above is a JPEG taken with my iPhone. In the second image, I have opened the file in Photoshop and zoomed in on the child's face.

 

 

 

  

 

The little squares you see in the closeup image are called "pixels." Every time you save an image as a JPEG, it loses some quality by throwing out pixels. So if you are editing an image in Photoshop, always save it as the native format first, which is a PSD (Photoshop Document).

 

In the Save As dialog box in Photoshop, choose "Photoshop" as the file format. This saves as a PSD and preserves all details. Then after you finish your edits, do another Save As and choose "JPEG." The original PSD remains fully intact.

 

The image below is an example of the same photo saved multiple times as a low-quality JPEG. Notice that that there is a squarish effect happening and details are lost. This effect is known as "JPEG artifact."

 

 

 

JPEGs use the "RGB colorspace," which has more than 16 million colors. This allows for beautiful continuous-tone images with fluid gradations and a full range of colors. It's a good choice for continuous-tone, but does not allow transparency or animation.

GIF

The "Graphic Interchange Format" (GIF) works in the "Indexed colorspace," so its color palette is quite limited--just 256 colors. GIFs do, however, support transparency and animation (the once-hated animated GIF is making a comeback; I see it every day on Facebook). The oldest format on the web (created in 1989), GIFs are saved as "lossless" compression.

In the image below, I have saved the image as a GIF and it contains just 256 colors. You can see that the image has lost some of its detail.

 

 

Here is an example of an image containing just 8 colors--all detail is gone and the image has a "posterized" effect.

 

 

 

GIFs are perfect for "flat color," i.e., logos or flat design graphics that don't have gradations or continuous-tone (remember: only 256 colors). 

 

PNG

 

The "Portable Network Graphic" was created (approved as a web standard in 1996) to provide high quality continuous-tone but also allow for transparency and animation.

PNGs are saved in the RGB colorspace, so they have the full range of 16 million+ colors. What I like best about PNGs is the ability to save transparency, which I use every day in my workflow. I save my graphics as high-quality PNGs and allow transparency (a checkbox I choose in Adobe Illustrator when I export a graphic to PNG).

In a recent project I wanted to use an image of a headset, and I needed the background to be transparent. I opened the image in Adobe Illustrator and set the Export PNG options to High Quality and set the Background Color to Transparency.

 

 

 

Thanks to the Transparency option, I had the freedom to overlay the headset on the green background shown below.

 

To Recap:

	JPEG	GIF	"PNG"
COLORS	16 MILLION +	256	16 MILLION +
TRANSPARENCY	NO	YES	YES
ANIMATION	NO	YES	YES
CONTINUOUS-TONE	YES	NO	YES
FLAT COLOR	NO	YES	YES

 

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If you'd like to attend some awesome 3-hour mini courses that focus on eLearning, check these out.

eLearning: Cloud Review and Collaboration with ReviewLink

by Stephanie Ivec  

One of the biggest hidden challenges when it comes to developing eLearning is getting feedback from your client, collaborating on course content with internal team members, or getting final project approval.

 

Sure, you can manage the collaboration or feedback process the old fashioned way--email. However, managing dozens upon dozens of project emails can quickly become a daunting task. Even if you're successful in managing the email strings, if your boss or client asks you to summarize the comments that were approved or rejected, re-reading the emails is likely going to be next to impossible.

 

One possible solution to this conundrum is ReviewLink, an online tool that lets eLearning developers host published courses and manage feedback--all in one place. Best of all: you can use ReviewLink with Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, or Lectora.

 

Work More Efficiently

Your manager, stakeholders, and subject matter experts can provide feedback directly on any page of a course. Each comment has a status--New, Fixed, OK, Not OK, or Archived--so you can easily keep track of your progress.

 

Thanks to ReviewLink, one company (Axcess Financial) reports saving 80 maintenance hours each year and trimming 12 weeks off of the review process. 

 

According to an Axcess Financial rep, "ReviewLink's cloud-based collaboration and easy content management contributed to a high level of efficiency, reduction in errors, and hours of time saved."

Above and beyond the review and collaboration time savings, ReviewLink can also also be used for beta testing with small groups of learners. For instance, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used ReviewLink to run a course pilot. By using ReviewLink, the CDC allowed multiple reviewers to share their opinions while keeping their comments hidden from each other. This prevented one reviewer's opinion from influencing another's first impression of the course.

How Do You Get There From Here?

As I mentioned above, you can use ReviewLink with Lectora, Storyline, or Captivate projects. If you are using Lectora, you can upload directly to ReviewLink from within the tool. Storyline and Captivate developers need to first publish the content and then upload the content into ReviewLink.

 

In Storyline, simply publish courses to the web with the Include HTML5 Output selected. When publishing, select ZIP.

 

In Captivate, turn off Quiz Reporting when publishing. When publishing, select Zip Files.

 

Once you have published your course content, login to ReviewLink and follow these steps to upload the content:

 

Next Time: The ReviewLink workflow.

***

You can download a free trial of ReviewLink here. Normally the review period lasts for 30 days. However, if you sign up for the ReviewLink trial now, you will receive an extra 30 days for free.

Adobe Captivate: The SCORM Cloud

by Kevin Siegel   

If you need your Captivate project to report learner scores and interactions, you'll likely need to publish as a SCORM-compliant package and then upload it into an LMS. However, there could be something in your project that isn't reporting correctly. You won't know there's a problem until after you publish the project, upload it to your LMS, and then test it. To save you a significant amount of work, Captivate allows you to verify your lesson will report accurately with an LMS via a free feature called Preview in SCORM Cloud. An LMS preview window appears allowing you to debug your project in preview mode and also view SCORM communication logs.

 

To preview a lesson in the SCORM cloud, add scoring objects to a project (such as a quiz) and enable SCORM reporting (via the Quiz Preferences dialog box). Then choose Preview > Preview in SCORM Cloud.

 

Click the Accept button and the project will be uploaded to the SCORM Cloud.

 

The lesson opens in a preview window. You can work through the lesson just as if it were published to an LMS. Errors will be reported in the Communication logs area at the bottom of the preview.

 

 

When the lesson is finished, close the preview to see the Relaunch the Preview dialog box. 

 

 

 

If you click the Get Results button, all kinds of reporting data will be available. If there aren't any errors in this window, there shouldn't be any errors when you upload the lesson into your LMS.

 

 

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Looking for training or help with Adobe Captivate? Check out these awesome live, online Captivate classes.