What do you do if you have a piece of e-Learning content that refuses to run on anything other than an outdated version of Windows and the company that developed the program has gone bust? Have it rewritten, obviously! However, what if you can’t afford to put the work out, can’t wait for a vendor to redevelop the material, or you simply can’t get anyone to take on the challenge? Do it yourself, right?
Wrong — unless you want to spend several months learning how to program. At least, that used to be the fear. Then along came the many authoring systems that claim to allow anyone to develop effective e-Learning without needing to be a programmer.
“Oh,” you groan, “that is just marketing hype.” Yes, it would be great if using an authoring system was as easy as using a word processor, but isn’t it the truth that most authoring systems can’t really achieve the kind of complex programs we want? Therefore, you feel that your only choice is to use tools like Flash, which can take a lot of learning before you manage to build anything useful, although they have come a long way from the days when drawing a line on the screen was like writing a mathematical formula.
Recently a customer of mine approached me for advice about how to “convert” a piece of courseware that was causing problems because it was not compatible with anything other than Windows98™. The company needed a course covering much of the original training, but updated so that it would run on the latest Windows™ platforms. A second requirement was to develop courseware that non-programming staff, i.e. instructors, could easily keep up-to-date, since the company often revised their procedures. The existing courseware had suffered from getting out of date quickly after purchase, because no one had the skills to modify it.
I volunteered to take on the challenge of reviewing whether there were any authoring systems that could do the job, developing a prototype with any such system that I found, and then submitting a proposal with a simple recommendation as to the tool they should use, since they had no appetite or time for a Brandon Hall-style survey.
To begin the task, a quick Web-search on authoring tools came up with a handful of options, and I began by downloading trial versions. Mindful that I could not do in-depth evaluations of everything on the market (Google returns 69 million hits for “authoring systems”), I spent an hour or so with three or four “candidates” before selecting the system I would try. Now I admit the selection process was not scientific, or by any means exhaustive. However, I reasoned that, if I could not see how to put together a menu and a few pages in under an hour or so, then a) the system did not suit my learning style, b) I was unlikely to make much progress with it quickly and, most importantly, c) neither would my customer. The system I was looking for had to have a number of key features. It had to:
- Be easy to install
- Have an intuitive interface — in other words the menus had to make finding things easy
- Be WYSIWYG — as I developed courseware I wanted to see what would be seen by the end-user
- Be capable of creating stand-alone PC, CD, or Web-based versions — and be able to create all three from the same source files
The system I eventually selected was Lectora from Trivantis Inc., and this article is a brief review of my experiences using the program. For reasons of confidentiality, the screen shots of the prototype I developed have been modified to remove the identity of my customer — but they do demonstrate, I think, what can be achieved with the Lectora authoring system in a very short space of time.
Wizard development
The customer sent me the existing program, so I examined it with Windows Explorer to see what type of files were involved. Essentially, it was composed of a series of bitmap graphics, a few animation files, and a bunch of audio narration files. Now I knew that if I was going to be able to reuse a lot of the original material, then I needed to build a container to hold it all. The container would act as the user interface, glue all the components together, and let the end user go from one teaching point to the next.
I also knew that Flash, Dreamweaver, or any Windows-based development environment had the muscle to replicate the old user interface — but I am not a Flash programmer nor did I have a couple of months to learn the program. Therefore, the question was, “Could I use Lectora to create a container, into which I could drop the old content?”
Lectora overcomes the problem of not being able to program by including a number of tools to help the non-programmer get started. It also comes with a very comprehensive user manual, including a very good chapter on planning and workflow for those who have never developed an e-Learning title before.
Most users of Microsoft products are familiar with wizards, and Lectora makes good use of them. The first of the tools for creating e-Learning modules is the “title wizard.” Trivantis has adopted a book metaphor so that for Lectora, e-Learning modules are “titles,” made up of “chapters,” “sections” (which are subchapters and can have sections within sections), and “pages.” The “pages” are what the end-user actually sees and where the developer actually creates the content or objects (text, graphics, video, audio, etc.).
The Lectora title wizard provides ten styles of user interface, with associated navigation buttons and color schemes. The most basic style is a plain white scheme, with very simple forward and back navigation buttons. The schemes are not at all bad and using any of them results in a professional-looking program. Most of the styles do default to 640 x 480 — and I would have liked to see styles using 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 resolution, which most of us use now. Nevertheless, since the screen resolution is a feature that the developer can change very simply, it is not a limitation. Most people will want to develop their own or custom look and feel — as I did (more about this later) — but to get started the wizard is an excellent tool to develop the basic structure or container for your content. I chose the blue aqua scheme shown in Figure 1.
The wizard runs through a dialogue and then sets up the basic structure of the title, including the number of chapters and pages you need, the background color for your title, and the navigation style you chose for the pages. I needed five chapters for my title and between 10 and 15 pages for each section — 60 pages in total. Lectora is very flexible, and using this process, you can create up to nine chapters with 99 pages in each chapter. One thing lacking in the title wizard is the ability to create sections within the chapters (Trivantis take note) but once you have created the basic structure, it is possible to add as many chapters, sections, and pages as you wish. The whole process took me around thirty seconds to complete the dialogue boxes and at the end when I hit the OK button, Lectora created a basic structure for my title, and was ready to populate it with content. Lectora also automatically added the menu and all the buttons and navigation so that the lesson was ready to run. Clicking the green traffic light icon on the Lectora tool bar launched the program in preview mode and I was able to see that I could page backwards and forward through a fully functioning lesson shell — albeit without my content.
Lectora also provides four templates — two Website templates and two CD or stand alone program templates — one academic and one corporate. The academic template is suitable for a school environment and includes quizzes. The corporate template meets the needs of the company wanting to produce a company induction program or a safety program. The difference between using the wizard and the templates is that the templates set the number of chapters, sections, and pages for you, along with suggested titles for the sections and hints for the content.
Both the title wizard and the templates are highly effective for the novice, allowing rapid assembly of an e-Learning program without the need to do any of the programming.
As the saying goes, nothing breeds success like success. With Lectora, using the wizard or templates guarantees success in the early stages — making the usual hard climb up the steep curve of learning a new program more like an elevator ride. I can’t believe that
anyone who really wants to develop an e-Learning program, as opposed to just playing with software, would not respond with enthusiasm to their first experiences of using Lectora.
Learning about and modifying the Structure
The Lectora system impressed me from the start. Not only is the installation process slick and efficient, but the design of the interface is elegant. The desktop consists of three areas, which I have identified in Figure 1 with callouts. The main area presents the screen design and provides a workspace for developing content. To the left side, a Windows Explorer™- type tree structure lists the various chapters, sections and pages along with all the objects in the title. Finally, at the top, the menu area organizes Lectora’s functions and tools.
The main area presents exactly what the learner will see in the finished program. There are three working modes — edit, run, and preview. Edit mode consumes most of the developer’s working time, as you would expect. The two additional modes are for testing the title. The run mode retains the development environment (although not the ability to edit), while activating all the objects, so the developer can check items such as buttons or media clips for appearance or performance. The preview mode launches the program as the end-user will see it, i.e. without the development interface.
One additional mode, if you are developing a Webbased title, allows the user to preview the title in a browser — although linked pages and screens are not available since Lectora only creates the current page. If you want to preview the whole title then you must first publish it to the location that will host it — either a desktop Web server or a remote server.
To me this arrangement is infinitely preferable to a system where you can’t see what the end-user is going to see until you hit the preview button. When designing a page, I want to see what it looks like immediately — particularly when speed is important. Lectora presents all this in its desktop environment.
There is another benefit of Lectora’s interface design. Because I used the wizard to develop the basic structure of the title, it was obvious with a little poking around how Lectora put all the elements together. At the top of the tree were all the features that appear on every section and page — so the navigation buttons are right up there. Lectora uses a simple concept — inheritance — that populates later pages with objects from earlier pages. So putting a button at the top of the structure adds it to all the pages that follow. Fortunately, the inheritance property is also editable so that if you want different layouts or features in different sections, then by switching off inheritance for the selected objects, you can remove them from the subsequent pages.
Looking at the structure of the title Lectora had created for me, I could see all the graphic objects, buttons, and text objects in the list. Previewing the title, I could see how the objects at the top of the tree were inherited across the title, and how the various buttons are set, through their properties, to navigate to different pages.
Getting the interface design to have the look and feel I wanted was relatively simple. I used a graphics program (Photoshop) to mock up the interface I wanted and then sliced and exported the various elements as separate bitmaps. Lectora supports all of the common graphic formats i.e. jpegs, gifs, tiffs, bmps, pngs, wmfs and emfs, as well as gif animations and Flash animations. I then used Lectora’s powerful drag-anddrop feature to drag the various elements from their folder into position onto the first page of my title. Bingo — my blank document now represented the design look I wanted. (See Figure 2)
Figure 2 The interface which I built by dragging and dropping elements onto the basic structure.
Dragging and dropping graphics works from most source locations — so if you have a corporate Web site with the look and feel you want, you can copy elements (such as your logo) from this and drop them into position. Each resulting graphic (and for that matter any resource such as audio, video, or animation) when dropped onto the desktop is copied and stored in a separate folder which Lectora automatically creates for you, solving the problem of media asset tracking at a stroke.
Lectora also comes with a button wizard that allows you to create your own buttons, or select buttons from an extensive range of options. Once I had created my background, I replaced the default button style with an alternative from the button library. Within an hour or so, I had my user interface, complete with corporate look and feel, a menu, and all the basic navigational features I wanted.
