Top Five Budget Breakers in eLearning Course Development

I recentntly spoke at a webinar on “Interactive Courses on a Shoestring Budget”. This webinar, conducted on Novermber 11, 2011 in three different time zones, was attended by hundreds of instructional designers and e-learning producers worldwide. One topic discussed during the webinar was the top five e-learning budget breakers. It generated a lot of interest and discussion. Just like a balanced diet is crucial to our well-being, likewise a good budget plan is pivotal to any eLearning course. One usually selects a combination of free and paid tools to create courses within budgets. But,  even after selecting the combination of free and paid tools the course could go over budgets.

Top5 Budget Breakers

The top five budget breaking situations encountered while creating an interactive course are briefly summarized below for your reference.

The Learning Curve
This is the first and the most obvious culprit. When you look out for development tools, you are in search of tools that make your tasks much simpler. Tools provide a variety of features and they often work in different ways, causing your learning curve to go up. While selecting a tool one should look for consistency of usage across features so that one can use the tool with a very short learning curve.

Raptivity provides a great example. Raptivity has over 150 templates such as games, interactive diagrams, surveys, brainteasers, simulations and many more. Yet, the templates are implemented consistently - so your learning curve is short. When you learn how to build a game, the learning curve of building a simulation is incrementally short. My suggestion therefore is to select a tool which has a short and a shared learning curve.

Sample Creation
This is one is another potential budget breaker. eLearning can take many different forms. It is a good practice to  create a variety of samples for clients so that they can understand different options available and make an intelligent selection. The creation of such varied samples creation is a hidden cost and we don’t realize it till the course is completed. I therefore believe that it is important to select tools that allow to create variations of a sample and thus save time and cost of creating them.

Getting Help
Tools provide various ways to provide help to their customers. Some options of providing help are: live support, local representative, independent product experts and online communities.
One should make a wise selection of the right source of help when one gets  stuck at some point in the course of mission critical projects. In such situations, one should decide how much to depend on community for advice and its accuracy for such time critical projects. In such cases, the best choice is to go for a premium support provided by the tool manufacturer.

Making Changes 
This one is big budget breaker. Your choice of tools could make a major impact on budget for a course. Let us consider a situation where a course requires some tweaking at the end before it is finalized. If one uses custom flash development for the project there are infinite possibilities of getting the changes accommodated in the course. If one has used a tool which has limitations then one will have to start from scratch to meet the changed requirements.  But these numerous changes also add up to the extra cost which over runs and you tend to lose track of the eLearning budget. I would suggest you to select a sufficiently flexible tool that permits to do some changes but not many options that it breaks your budgets.

Migration Cost
The final budget breaker is “Migration”. A lifecycle of a course may extend beyond your projections. For example, requests from the customers for LMS upgrades, 508 compliant support, SCORM compliance support, iPad support using HTML5 technology, mLearning, etc. These changes can cause lot of additional work if your tool is not able to meet up with these requirements. The best way to handle such situations is by having a tool that protects you from potential budget problems and helps you makes such changes in time.

To view the recording of this webinar and get more insights into the top 5 budget breakers you can click here.

Twelve Ways to Add Value to Open Source LMS Systems

I've been too wrapped up thinking about interactivity to pay attention to the pains learning managers must go through for making their Moodle implementations effective. So, when I sat down to talk with Dr Asheesh Choksi, technology consultant and architect, about Moodle, he gave me a 12-point program to add value to Moodle - which was quite an eye opener.

1. User Management
 User management is the starting point in making Moodle successful.  Here we deal with problems such as grade data privacy, activation and deactivation of users for business reasons, and protecting sensitive business information arising from learning systems from prying eyes.

2. Catalog Management
 What does the learner see on logging in? This is the province of content display and catalog management. Examples include news, events, calendar, assignments, course list etc.

Better structuring of information to be shown on landing page to facilitate users to quickly see needed updates and get access to other areas of the system

3. Business Reports
 How do you assess the effectiveness of a course delivered? What questions are learners failing consistently? Moodle captures most  of the data, but getting it out in meaningful reports needs some statistical analysis and design effort.

4. Student Reports
 How cool it will be if a student were to get a special personalized 'recommended for you' list of resources? How about showing a recap of  'your recent learning activity'? A well-customized Moodle can do that.

5. Offline capability
When your learners are always on the go, in far-flung parts of the world, internet connections vary from excellent to un-reliable and even non-existent sometimes. So you need to support offline learning capability. The learner should download the course, go and learn in offline mode, take tests and synchronize the results when net is connected back. This can be done using Google Gears to some extent, or with the Harbinger Offline Player all the way up to SCORM compatible tracking.

6. DRM Support
Worried that someone may copy proprietary content? You need to think about who can access, and what they can do with the courses you deliver. The solution needed is a custom course reader with several lockdown levels (machine access lockdown, copy disable lockdown).

7. Collaborative Annotation System
You want learners to share their annotations on courses. Of course, there could be multiple cohorts learning a course at the same time. Each cohort needs to have his/her own share of annotation space. You don’t want to burden Moodle with the task of managing annotations. The solution is a separate collaborative annotation server, such as TeemingPod.

8. Mobile Support
Learners are flocking to  iPads, iPhones and other tablets and smartphones. These devices are supported using MLE Moodle, an opens ource plugin for iOS and Android. This takes some coding but can be done, and well worth it. So your LMS has a mobile nexus with the learners.

9. Payment Gateway
Need to have learners pay using  PayPal or some other gateway? You can implement your own payment model such as bulk access, pay-as-you-go, pay-per-course etc. using payment gateway integration.

10. Performance Tuning and Scalability
A lot of times, training can be driven by organization-wide events and initiatives. So everyone wants to access the material at the same time. This results in  high user load, and slows down performance. This is when code optimization, caching and other expert solutions from Harbinger - ranging up to  cluster server deployment- come handy.

11. Video streaming
Moodle does not stream video effectively. For better streaming experience third party integration with services like YouTube, Kaltura and so on.

12. Virtual Class Room
Synchronous classrooms have the added advantage of a live instructor available at the time of learning. Open source platforms such as Open Meetings  or Big Blue Button can be integrated with Moodle to bring in this capability.

I know it's quite a handful, says Dr Choksi, but the effort is well worth it - take care of these points and you will end up with a state-of-the-art Moodle implementation that your learners and administrators will love, he adds.

Getting a Head Start with Mobile Interactions

When Raptivity released its first collection of mobile interactions for iPad and iPhone based eLearning, the path-breaking HTML5 Pack received several accolades. While it was a very useful collection of interactions, it mainly featured a bunch of memory aids such as flash cards. Clearly, there was a need for adding more interactions  to make it instructionally more useful and complete.

It is not easy to design HTML5 interactions from the ground up and make them behave exactly like their Flash counterparts. For example, in the iPad world, there is no mouse-over, so any interaction involving mouse-over has to use mouse clicks.

That's why I am excited about the new Raptivity HTML5 Starter Pack. With this new Raptivity extension, you don't have to spend hours thinking about how to emulate Flash-like interactions in HTML5.

Raptivity HTML5 Starter Pack

The new pack features interactions that let you jazz up your presentations. You can encourage exploration by learners. Then there are interactive quizzes that test knowledge and provide feedback. You can also provide ready reference materials for the people on the go. These interactions, together with memory aids available in the Raptivity HTML5 Turbopack released earlier, provide a rich variety of templates that suit a large number of instructional goals.


The following table summarizes the various interactions and their usage. Please note that (H5T) indicates the Raptivity HTML5 Turbopack, (H5S) indicates the Raptivity HTML5 Starter Pack.  

Jazz up presentation
Flip the Book	Present a fun page-turner with embedded video and other media (H5S)
Circles	Create interactive concentric circles with callouts (H5S)
Hub-and-Spokes	Illustrate radial relationships with interactivity (H5S)
Slide show	Build image transitions with a soundtrack (H5T)
Encourage exploration
Show-and-tell	Create a step-by-step software simulation (H5S)
Ladder	Illustrate the steps of a process in sequence, and show details (H5S)
FAQ	Provide an easy way to access Frequently Asked Questions (H5S)
Buildup and Rollover	Gradually build up complex pictures and explain each part as you go (H5S)
Test Knowledge
Pairing	Build a match-the-pair exercise with bells and whistles (H5S)
Tree	Allow the learner to build a tree structure illustrating relationships (H5S)
Branching Question	Implement a series of questions with adaptation based on learner’s answers (H5S)
Catch ‘em Fast	Create rapid-fire questions where speed is critical (H5T)
Provide ready reference
Glossary	Build an easy look-up glossary (H5S)
Help memorize content
Flash Cards	Help reinforce and memorize study material on the go (H5T)
Study Card Deck	Help learners in a hurry who need an easy way look up study material using panning cards  (H5T)
Study Card Shuffle	Study cards with text, pictures and video get displayed in a sequence  (H5T)
Memory Aid Peeler	Let learners peel away virtual pages and discover additional content (H5T)

Try out this cutting-edge product by downloading it from the Raptivity website.

The Future of e-Learning Content after Adobe Kills Flash on Mobile Devices

It is official. Adobe, in a written statement, announced that it will not support Flash in mobile browsers henceforth. As it is, iPhone and iPad don't play Flash content. It will be a matter of time before  new versions of other mobile devices (based on Android and other platforms) stop supporting Flash in browsers.

What does this mean for e-learning content? Well, Adobe continues to be committed to supporting Flash on the PC platform. Adobe also says that mobile content can be packaged using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and delivered through app stores in the form of native apps. But these might be roundabout ways. Most e-learning developers may turn towards HTML5, in the hope that their content will play across browsers and platforms.

mLearning in Africa

Recently I had a chance to talk to a speaker at e-Learning Africa 2011 in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Vinod Ganjoo is an e-learning enthusiast who works as Senior Manager - e-learning Business Development at Harbinger. Vinod has traveled throughout the Middle-east, Africa and South Asia on business. He interacts with instructional designers and training managers in several countries regularly. 

What's the big excitement about m-Learning in Africa?
VG: The stage is set for m-Learning in Africa. Mobile devices penetration in Africa is expected to pass 50% during 2011. At least eight African countries will have broken the 100% mobile penetration barrier by the end of the year. Some African mobile markets are still growing at more than 100% per annum. African mobile market forecast to 2013 is impressive. Nigeria alone will have over 130M subscribers.

What are the major impediments for the spread of e-learning in Africa?
VG: Internet connectivity is a big challenge for e-learning, particularly in remote areas and in certain countries. Another major challenge is electricity. However, m-Learning is feasible because phone networks are ubiquitous, and you don't require continuous electricity for mobile phone operation.

What are the benefits of m-Learning in this market?
 VG: m-Learning is truly self paced, 24X7 learning. It can happen any time, anywhere. The learner does not have to brave a trek to the school, crossing rivers and hills. There are innovative interaction and engagement   opportunities. And best of all, there is no need for additional devices such as personal computers. You can reach the fringe student simply using a mobile phone.

What according to you is the biggest challenge in developing content for m-Learning?
 VG: I can name three challenges: One, interactivity is necessary. Two, Flash won't work on all phones. Three,  programming skills required to produce mobile learning are limited.

Don't rapid authoring tools solve these problems?
 VG: To an extent - yes. Many tools support both Flash and HTML5. Some of them even have interactivity - but it is limited to basic interactions such as multiple choice questions, drag-and-drop, click-and-reveal.

And why is that not enough for the African students?
VG: You need to engage students. They will get fatigued and bored with simple interactions. Those are fine for assessments. When the goal goes beyond assessment, you need a wider variety of interactions, such as the ones Raptivity provides.

How did the conference attendees respond to Raptivity?
VG: The response was very good. A lot of teachers and school representatives came and met me. They tried out the software and had a lot of questions. They pointed out to me that they could use Raptivity in classrooms as well, not only in m-Learning or e-Learning.

Thanks, and good luck.
VG: My pleasure.

Using Raptivity with Captivate

Several Captivate users build Raptivity interactions for use in their elearning and presentation materials. Adobe, the maker of Captivate, has been releasing upgrades and new versions of Captivate over the past several quarters. Naturally, their users want to stay on top of the best ways to use Raptivity within Captivate.

Raptivity for its part has also kept a high pace of innovation, with new releases coming out ever so often. The resources I will cite here are useful for Raptivity 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2 and 6.5.

A recent blog post on the Raptivity blog addresses the integration of Raptivity with Captivate quite comprehensively for Captivate 5.5, Captivate 5 and Captivate 4. In addition, here are some more places you might want to go.

1.  The first place to go is the ‘Using Raptivity Output with Other Tools’ document which you will find under the resources page of Raptivity website.
2. The Captivate integration steps – if you are trying to work around audio issues – are found here.
3. One great place to get the latest word on this is the online Raptivity Community. Here you will find discussion forum on Raptivity Captivate integration. 
4. Community forums for all other tools are accessed here.

Raptivity 6.6 Enhanced Element Collection Management

When a product evolves from one generation to the next, many things get better - sometimes to a point where you find it hard to imagine how they had been before. I am having one of those moments with Raptivity right now.

One recently implemented feature of Raptivity 6.6  has got me thinking. It is the Enhanced Element Collection Management functionality. I know that sounds a mouthful - but the idea is really basic. In designing interactions, you often need collections of similar elements. Examples - a pyramid has levels, a flipbook has pages, a simulation has scenes, an animation has path segments, a rollover diagram has hotspots, an assessment has questions and so forth. All these are examples of collections.

In working with collections, here are some common situations the course developer comes across:

1. Add a new element
2. Delete an element in between 
3. Duplicate an element along with its contents
4. Drag an element from somewhere and place it  somewhere else

You can imagine how hard life would be if you could not perform these seemingly simple actions easily. Yet, in the past, users had to resort to all kinds of clever shortcuts and workarounds to accomplish these tasks. That was life before Raptivity 6.6.

Now with Raptivity 6.6, users can use the mouse right-click context menu and easily insert a blank element,  delete or duplicate an existing element or alter the sequence of elements with a simple drag-and-drop operation. That makes it easy to duplicate a flash card, re-sequence questions in a TV game and delete that panning card you don't like.

This discussion applies to collections of various elements supported in Raptivity. Certain special graphic elements such as Paths, Highlights, Hotspots and Parts  don't get covered under the new functionality. Why is that? Because Raptivity already has a way for you to manipulate these directly from the interactivity editor itself.

If all the user feedback and comments on Raptivity community are any indication, this new feature set is sure to receive a warm welcome! Users will see it as a sure productivity enhancer.

Better Productivity with Raptivity: A Story of Customer Centricity

When Yehudi Menuhin was asked: "What has music taught you?" he replied: "It has taught me to listen." It is no different with product design. You design products in a flash of inspiration, and keep making them better by listening to your customers.

The Raptivity 6.5 release is full of productivity features that are based on ideas that come straight from the trenches. Here are some examples.


Users found it a chore to delete sample content from interaction templates before adding their own. They needed the sample the first couple of times, but later on they wanted a way to start with a clean slate. That was the genesis of Raptivity's Blank Template.

Another area where course developers faced some inconvenience was in putting together media content for use in interactions. Raptivity now shows helpful information such as recommended image size, sound bit rate, video format, size, frame rate etc alongside the customization window.

As interactivity design came to occupy prime time, a quick step-by-step procedure to build interactions became critical. The new version of Raptivity provides that too - in the customization screen.

Raptivity's productivity enhancements span across the entire product usage experience. Users can convert their trial installation into full use package just by adding a license key. There is no need to install the full package over again. Likewise, while deactivating the product, the license key is detected automatically. These little enhancements bear testimony to Raptivity's commitment to the course developers' productivity.