Rapid Development Service

European eLearning Summit

Held at the East Midlands Conference Centre on the campus of Nottingham University, August 2008.

Built on the history of the popular EuroTAAC Authorware and eLearning conference, EeLS is bigger and better than ever before. With quality presentations from eLearning professionals sourced from across Europe, EeLS has detailed and up-to-date information useful to all eLearning professionals, from Educational Designers and Developers, through to managers, educators and corporate planners.

Interactive Presentations presented two sessions:

Creating Applications on a Budget and to Time

Many online applications consist of text, graphics and animations. Interaction is added by allowing the user to hide and show various objects, drag objects and input data. The key to a successful application is the way that all these elements are combined.

A range of standard templates have been created that produce attractive interactive screens, but this is only half the story. A form based content entering tool has been created that allows the user to type text information directly into the form, or to import text from “Word” or “PowerPoint” documents. Graphics are imported into the content entering tool and the author can positions these in the appropriate positions (start and end points of interactions). Using this method a complex interactive page can be set up in minutes, without the need of any expert programming knowledge.

The data for each template page is stored as a text file and these text files are used to build the online application. The content is separated from the application.

The separation of the content from the application has potential benefits such as the data can be read by different applications (e.g. Toolbook or Flash), the subject matter expert can make changes to individual pages or pages from different applications can be incorporated into the current application.

Thinking outside the box on a budget
How do people learn?
• They watch other people perform a task.
• They are given detailed instructions on how to perform a task.
• They read about the task and are shown illustrations on how to do it.

They then perform the task and their mistakes are corrected. The problem with computer based packages is that they tend to force the learner down predefined routes. How do you add flexibility and yet keep the costs down?
This session explores the ways that the more flexibility can be added to an application and shows how these are built out of the standard building blocks. However, these bespoke screens are time consuming to create and hence expensive. If the interactions can be broken down to standard template screens then the production costs can be greatly reduced.

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