iPad and eLearning

If you are looking to deliver eLearning via the Apple iPad and need help, call Magic at (866) 501-6897 or email magic+mediamanagers.net. Creating custom eLearning for use on the iPad poses unique challenges for the industry. Why? Well, for one, the iPad does not support Adobe Flash, which is the overwhelming industry standard for web-based interactive eLearning development. The vast majority of serious eLearning authoring tools have some form of Flash support or capability, and many eLearning developers create eLearning natively in Flash. According to sources within Adobe, over 70% of games and 75% of web video is deployed upon Flash – including the popular television video site Hulu. So authoring eLearning for the iPad requires eLearning developers to learn some new skills. The example iPad eLearning demo below was output as a QuickTime movie, which works quite well on the iPad.

Example Video of Elearning Designed for the iPad

Click the Play button on the bottom left corner of this demo to start playback.

iPhone OS

The first generation iPad runs the iPhone OS (which probably will need a new name, since the operating system runs on iPod, iPad, and iPhone). You should pick up an iPad for development purposes and get a feel for its interface, capabilities, and limitations. There are many issues with the iPhone OS that make it less than optimal for business users. For one, the content is managed through iTunes, rather than a user-friendly and familiar file folder structure. Additionally, you can only run one application at a time. Meaning, you cannot listen to the iPod while switching between editing a spreadsheet and document.

Additionally, you’ll want to experience the difference between loading content movies (you’ll likely want to experiment with QuickTime as a Flash replacement for now) and loading these on a web server and accessing the training via the Safari browser on the iPad. While loading QuickTime movies on the iPad will make them load and run faster than accessing them over a broadband connection, you may find that it is easier to lay out your course navigation on the web rather than manage this content across a bunch of iPads in the field. Moreover, the largest iPad hard drive size is 64 GB. If your learners download any significant number of HD movies, install photos, or otherwise sycn their iPad to their personal iTunes account, you’ll quickly run out of space. Your QuickTime movies will also be much larger than your typical Flash-based movies, putting even more demand on the hard drives. 

HTML5

HTML5 is the proposed new version of the HyperText Markup Language and is designed to allow web developers an HTML-based method for delivering content in ways presently dependent upon Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and other multimedia applications. If you wish to deploy applications to the browser that have a look and feel of Flash, but are pure HTML, then HTML5 will be one of the key skills you’ll want in your arsenal.

QuickTime

If you are accustom to developing high-quality audio/visual eLearning in Flash, then you are probably not going to want to trade down to less sophisticated looking content simply because the iPad does not support Flash. A solid option is to output your content movies as QuickTime. This will work for much of the lecture based content, but the interactive “you try it” types of lessons will require some thought. I’ll write more about this in a later article.

Blackboard Moodle

Do you need help converting your Blackboard courses to the SCORM eLearning standard or moving your content from Blackboard to Moodle? Contact the guys at LearningDeveloper.com at (866) 501-6897.

If your organization has created courses directly within Blackboard only to discover that you cannot export Blackboard courses to SCORM, you are not alone. Presently there is no “Blackboard Export Course” feature – only an Archive Course option that allows the LMS administrator to backup Blackboard formatted courses. So if your organization is interested in migrating your content from Blackboard to Moodle, you have several options from which to choose.

Convert Blackboard Course to SCORM

The first and best option is to convert your courseware to SCORM. This can quickly and easily be done by experienced SCORM consultants like the folks at LearningDeveloper.com. It is recommended that courses be converted to SCORM because this will not only enable you to import your Blackboard courses into Moodle, it will also allow you to insert your courses into any SCORM-compliant LMS. Moreover, you can take the opportunity to clean up the unnecessary code that Blackboard inevitably adds to the course. The process of migrating Blackboard courses to SCORM is essentially:

1. Archive and save your Blackboard courses as zip packages
2. Clean up the Blackboard course code (HTML) by removing unnecessary tags and correcting badly formatted HTML.
3. Add SCORM Wrapper code to the optimized Blackboard course package

Blackboard Content Conversion Tool

Depending upon the Moodle implementation (version) you will use, there are several tools designed to help you convert your content to Moodle. There is both a Moodle 1.4x Conversion tool and a Moodle 1.5+ conversion tool. From a high-level perspective, the steps are to: 

• Export course from Blackboard
• Export test pools from Blackboard
• Import course to Moodle and re-format your course by hand
• Import test pools to Moodle
• Extract tests from XML
• Import tests to Moodle

While these options may appear more attractive to someone who does not have the programming and other skills to clean up the courses and convert them to SCORM (and absolutely no budget whatsoever to engage a freelance consultant), the downside is that both Blackboard and Moodle add code to the courses automatically that may not be formatted the way that you want. For this reason, it is highly recommended that you simply have your courseware reorganized and laid out correctly from scratch using a SCORM authoring and presentation tool.