Category: Learning

Matching the trends

What is good about spending 10 hours in a plane? You finally get the time to catch up on your reading. I read the Netlash trendrapport, and Stephen Downes’ The Future of online learning: ten years on.

Both reports were written from a different viewpoint and with a different scope, but it is interesting to see that they make similar observations:

  • Interaction will be key: wether it is called social learning, conversation or social networking, technology will facilitate  the fact that we can learn from each other.
  • Technology once seen as futuristic can break through: I wrote this in San Diego on a 300$ netbook, you might read this as an RSS feed on your iPhone. Virtualization and cloud computing will change the way we work and learn.
  • Connectivity and always-connected devices will allow us to interact with and learn continuously from people in our virtual network. 

The ones who manage to deal with all these changes and use them in a creative way will survive. At least one thing that did not change…

A strong limitation of Microsoft LCDS

I have been playing quite some time now with Microsoft’s Learning Content Development System. I promised in an earlier post to put some content online, but that is where it went wrong. I just could not get the content published in any other LMS than the SharePoint Learning Kit.

After some testing, it seems that the content needs to be hosted on… a Microsoft IIS server. All my test systems were running Apache, PHP and MySQL (as most open source lms systems do).

For me, these are some serious limitations to LCDS as an authoring tool.

Adding a new language to Microsoft LCDS

Someone asked me if it would be possible to add a new language to the available language packs of the Microsoft Learning Content Development System. Well, as the system supports already multiple languages, that should not be that difficult. This is what I did (use at your own risk!):

  • Navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Learning\LCDSc\application\viewer. This folder contains a subfolder, one for every available language.
  • Copy the folder that corresponds most to the language you want to create. Or if no correspondence, copy any folder and give it a three letter language code.
  • Inside your new folder, go to the folder named shared. Inside that folder, there is a folder with the same language code, rename that to your new code.
  • Inside that folder, there is a file version.xml. Edit the file in Notepad and make the necessary changes.
  • Open the viewer folder inside that folder.
  • The file viewerstrings.js contains the different language strings for the viewer. Edit the file in Notepad and translate.
  • The Help and appart folder contain the help screens. Translate these if necessary.
  • Go back to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Learning\LCDSc\application and edit the supportedLanguages.xml file with notepad. Copy one of the lines to add a new line for your language.

Done! The new language should appear when creating a new course!

Why “SharePoint for Dummies” is not enough for your end users…

Very often, I talk to IT-people about providing end user training for their SharePoint implementation. Recently, on two separate occations, two IT managers made the same remark: “Just give them the “SharePoint for Dummies” book and they will be fine.”

I really hate it when people talk about “dumb” end users. But this set aside, I want to make clear why this is not really a good solution for end user training for SharePoint:

  • A SharePoint end user training should always be a custom training: the SharePoint feature palette is so vast that while books discuss most of the features, companies only use their 20% of the functionalities. So why bother giving information about the ones you do not use?
  • There is more to it than just SharePoint functionality: very often, the implementation of SharePoint brings changes in work methods, procedures, information sharing… Those are specific for your organisation.
  • You need to sell your SharePoint solution to your internal audience. People are resistent to the change in their work habits, even if it is an improvement. Giving a book is not a very good sales pitch.

Microsoft released some interesting material to accomplish this. Very good material, but don’t make the same mistake: don’t throw this at your end user “as is”. Customize, customize…

Testing Microsoft LCDS

OK, I found some time tonight to give the new Microsoft Learning Content Development System a try. I created a small sample course, using the LCDS, Captivate, and Paint.Net.

Some findings:

  • The structure of Module – Lesson – Topic is very rigid. This is good for having a consistent structure in your course, but for small modules it is sometimes overkill, resulting in some blank pages, or pages-where-you-need-to-invent-some-content-because-the-page-is-there-anyway.
  • The templates are very easy to use. Integration of .swf works well.
  • Sometimes I would like to tweak some html-code, but there does not seem to be a way via the UI. Embedding a Youtube video for example would be nice.
  • After moving around some navigation items, I had a corrupt topic, it kept messing up the navigation. Deleting the topic resolved the issue.
  • The color scheme of tables (beige) is not very nice; could probably be fixed by modifying the stylesheet that is used.
  • The testing/question templates are quite nice. Multiple choice, true-false, even some drag&drops.

I tried importing the package in a WSS site with the SharePoint Learning Kit: worked like a charm! No errors, navigation is nicely taken over by the Learning Kit viewer. This might become a very powerful combination for organisations looking for low cost content creation and distribution! Have a look at the screencast.

I’ll try to put my content online somewhere so that you can have a look at it.