Frankenstein Course Development
I am currently creating a course and as usual it involves numerous development tools. This course consists of using three main tools. Here they are and why I am using them.
Adobe Flash – My favorite tool of choice. I like its flexibility in making the interactive assets I need for the course and not being constrained by prepackaged interactives that come with many e-learning development tools. In this case I am making the course itself in Flash. This includes each page, characters, animation, and interactive elements with the exception of the software simulations (sims) and the final assessment/quiz.
Adobe Captivate – The course will contain many “try me” sims for a software upgrade in which we are implementing. I am developing these in Captivate, which in my opinion is the best out there for creating software sims. Each sim will launch in a new window from the Flash course. Keeping these in a separate folder and launched as individual SWFs will also help keep the file size and load time down.
Articulate – Presenter and Quizmaker are providing the assessment and an ease of packaging it as a SCORM compliant course. What I like is the ease of developing an assessment in Quizmaker. In this case I will take my Flash course and import the SWF to the first page of Articulate Presenter. A single button in my menu, called Knowledge Check, will move the user from the Presenter page containing the course SWF to the second page where the assessment begins. The ability to have a Flash button, or menu, work within Presenter was the kicker. This allowed me to get the best of both worlds; Flash and using Articulate to create the assessment and SCORM packaging. Here is a tutorial from Screenr that shows how you can make a Flash menu that will change slides in Presenter.
Looking for THE SCORM Resource?
Yesterday I attended a SCORM webinar provided by Advance Distributed Learning (ADL). If you do not know the ADL, they are a part of the U.S. Department of Defense and are the producers of SCORM. At the conclusion of the webinar they gave a tour of some of the available resources on their site. These include SCORM documentation, past webinar slides, and content examples, including the files from a Flash example. which you will find listed as “Plug-In Technologies Content Example.” They also provide a test suite. FYI: All of the above are free to download.
If you are working with SCORM on any level, ADLnet.gov is a great “go-to” resource. For additional SCORM resources, I have collected more at http://delicious.com/MinuteBio/scorm
Do you have any great SCORM resources? Please share in the comments section, thanks.
