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Nowadays most software comes with support in a form of pdfs. Video tutorials created in tools like Camtasia (www.camtasia.com) or software simulation (i.e. Adobe Captivate) become more and more popular.  However, there is still lack of interaction with human. A user is only a receiver of information and doesnt have much influance on the support that is displayed to him.

Today I met a new sollution which is simple and genious:)

SHO is a tool that allows us to add support to the "live system". Its very simple. Fistly we have to create a special script, but dont worry, no programming skills are required:) You just have to "click through" all the windows that you want to include in your tutorial. A ready script have to be run in a speciall player before running the right aplication. The next step is…using our application:) The support comments/audio/videos will be displayed during our interactions with the system, according to the current context. Thats the main strenght of this solution! The script can consist questions or menues that will run another paths of the script (if we’ve created any)

Of course there have to be some drawbacks:)

The only supported applications so far are:

# Microsoft .NET applications
# Browser-based applications running in Internet Explorer 6.0/greater or Firefox 2.0/greater
# Applications developed with Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
# Microsoft Office applications
# Java Swing applications

You have to see this one:)

Link: www.transcensus.com

Tag: e-learning, simulation, support, tutorial, SHO

Articulate is my favourite vendor for e-learning authoring tools. It allows graphical disabled people like me to create engaging and good looking ) After intensive beta tests a new version of Articualte Studio has been released. The Studio consits of 4 tools: Presenter, Engage, Quizmaker and new Video Encoder. The thing that I like the most about these new release is a bigger freedom that is given to the user. Here is a list of changes that in my opinion are the most important.

Articulate Quizmaker (tool responsible for test&surveys creation)
- all the elements in the test slide – pictures, text, choices fields, can be now positioned in any place, resized or even animated (simple powerpoint like presentations). We can also add as many different elements (flash moveis, pictures etc.)as we want.

Articulate Engage (tool responsible for interactive slides creation)
- new interaction type – its a template that can be filled with everything we want – flash movies, pictures and other objects. I think that in a short time in the web there will be a lot of new interesting interactions created by the users that we can insert in our course.

Atriculate Presenter (the main tool that connects elements from Quizmaker and Engage and publish finished e-learning course)
- branching – now we can define the navigation in every slide depending on actions performed by the user
- single slide preview – there is no need to publish the whole course to see the changes anymore
- better quality of pictures and flash movies
- publication to podcasts – the lector can now be now recorded and published to mp3 file than can be stored on any mp3 player (nice feature for m-learning freaks like me:)

Articulate Video Encoder – Its a new tools which allows conversion of popular video formats like avi or mpeg to flash files that can be later inserted within the course.

To sum up – its nicer, looks better and offers really cool functionality. Give it a try, U won’t regret it;)

Link: www.articulate.com/products/studio.php

Tags: e-learning content, authoring tool, Articulate, SCORM