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Mobile Learning: What Works? What Doesn’t?

By poonam on May 3, 2012 in , , , , , , , , , ,

Evolution of Mobile learning technologies is on an upward swing. The concept of mobile learning is so interwoven into our daily routine that we will be surprised to come across someone who is ignorant of it. The onslaught of ever increasing mobile devices with new features and capabilities also pose new challenges to eLearning developers and course creators. HTML5 has already emerged as the industry standard for building rich interfaces for mobile learning.

The benefits of mobile learning are well known – but how does one overcome the challenges in creating interactive content for the new devices? All of us need a comprehensive solution that overcomes device level challenges, such as small and varying screen sizes, limited processing power, variability of input mechanisms (keypad, keyboard, pointer, touch screen, etc), variety of operating systems, battery life, and many more!

After observing the challenges course creators have to face in creating course content for mobile learning, Raptivity has organized a special webinar on “Learning Interactions On Mobile Devices. What Works? What Doesn’t?” on May 15th, 2012. This webinar will shed light on key issues considered important while developing mobile learning interactions.

learning-interactions-on-mobile-devices

You will be interacting with today’s Mobile Learning Guru’s; Robert Gadd who is the President & Chief Mobile Officer at OnPoint Digital and Janhavi Padture, Associate Vice President – Strategy & Research at Harbinger Knowledge Products. They will put forth new perspectives on means to face common challenges of M-Learning course creation with:

  • A checklist of technical considerations for developing interactive content for mobile learning.
  • Flash vs. HTML5 – the pros and cons of each.
  • Expert tips on creating interactive mLearning content.
  • And many more effective solutions..

The interactive presentation will be followed by an equally interactive Q&A session. Raptivity team will host three webinars during the day in order to accommodate participants in all time zones. Join us at the time below that suits you best:

1)      Click on https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/118113897 to register for US Friendly timings: 10:00 am – 11:00 am PST

2)      Click on https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/934173185 to register for UK and India friendly timings: 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm CET

3)      Click on https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/959654585 to register for Asia Pacific friendly timings: 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm AEDT

Quickly register to get yourselves well versed in creating learning interactions for mobile devices. Looking forward to meeting you all the webinar.

 

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Mobility in Learning

By poonam on April 26, 2012 in , , , , ,

People are eagerly waiting for the next metro at the rush hour. Expressways are jammed up. It was a bad day for the stock markets around the globe. More discounts to online shoppers and many such bits and pieces of information are always at our fingertips. The point I am trying to drive is that the powerful mobile technology we use every day is changing our nature and means of accessing information.

This has been the case with learning too. Learning has gone through phases of advancement in recent times. First, we had eLearning which took some time to create an impression in peoples mind. By the time, eLearning became feasible for the masses; we have the new entrant “Mobile Learning”. Mobile learning is at times also considered an offshoot of eLearning but that isn’t the case.

Mobile learning or m-learning attempts to do the same thing so one should not misconstrue it to be two different processes. M-Learning is already a thriving phenomenon in the developed parts of the world and also an emerging field in the developing continents. It has recently caught everyone’s attention and it certainly has a great potential for contributing to social and economic development of the learning masses globally.  Mobility in Learning

Use of portable mobile platforms such as tablet PCs, PDAs, and smart phones with wireless networks enable not only mobility but also mobile learning. This allows teachers and students to learn and also to extend their teaching to spaces beyond the conventional classrooms. Within the classroom, instructors are using mobile learning to open up new avenues of interaction with learners.

Numerous creative educationists are exploring new ways of utilizing powerful mobile technologies coupled with guided instructional and pedagogy theories to leverage the potential of mobile learning. Now, using these mobile technologies and digital media to support learning also requires reforming our thinking and practices on how to design learning courses compatible for dissemination on mobile platforms. This also requires adequate mobile learning tools support to the instructional designers and teachers working on the learning course content.

Even though mobility is expanding at a tremendous pace, there are also many challenges to be tackled in making learning content feasible for adaption on mobile devices. For starters, the capabilities supported by mobile versions of commonly used development technologies such as Flash® are different from desktop. On the other side, HTML5 is fast emerging as the industry standard for building rich interfaces. Internet bandwidth through broadband and wireless is still to reach the momentum.

Even after these challenges, mLearning is still expanding the possibilities of where and how learning could occur with well-designed and agile learning spaces. What we expect from such technologies is that they support and enable both mobility and effective learning in the virtual and conventional classrooms. They also need to enable learning experiences that are collaborative, accessible, and integrated with the world beyond the classroom. Lastly, it is important to remember that technology is just a powerful tool but learning completely depends on sharing knowledge, people, places, activities and content delivered with the aid of such technology.

I look forward for your thoughts on mobile learning, challenges being faced in the development and use cases in your organization.

 

 

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Online Community Training Case Study

By poonam on April 18, 2012 in , , , , , , , , , ,

Training conducted through online communities is an arduous task but worth mentioning the efforts taken by an organization with the use of Raptivity. Generally, organizations have discussions and announcements made on online communities but going a step further with training is much more engagement of the audience on the virtual platform.  Let’s get a glimpse of this successful episode by Edvance Research.

About Edvance Research

Edvance Research is an incorporation that improves outcomes for students through building the capacities of educators and their school communities to conduct, understand and use research in their practice. They provide an entire online community of practice for professional development and conduct internal trainings to train the employees to create the policy and practices for their clients.

Edvance Online Community

The Challenge

The company always used conventional methods of training with sources like webinar and whiteboards to train the employees. It was very difficult to train the employees regularly and even harder to train who are not physically present in the classroom. The trainers used courses developed in PowerPoint®. It was very difficult to create the courses for teachers using only PowerPoint presentation. These courses were not interactive. The external customers too were demanding interactive modules.

The Approach

The need of interactivity in the course content was the root of the problem that could be fixed but with the choice of the right tool that integrates very well with existing tools used for creating training course modules. One of the employees suggested Raptivity, the interactivity building tool was the best solution for this.

With Raptivity, they could address some of the crucial issues such as:

  • Developing interactive training material for external contracts
  • Developing learning modules for their online community
  • Creation of interactive presentation slides for their internal coaching
  • Integration of the tool with their existing authoring tool – Articulate.

Resulting Benefits:

  • Edvance Research was able to develop flash based instructional modules which were used for internal and external audience.
  • The training presentation slides are more interactive.
  • An increase in the course usage since interactions created using Raptivity has been introduced in the Online Community.
  • Raptivity helps in creating highly interactive courses with the use of games, quizzes and various interactivity displays.
  • Many more accruing benefits.

These are just a handful of benefits listed above but there is no escaping the fact that online community training is viable without the knowledge of programming and easy to customize templates of engaging interactions from Raptivity. If you are ready to start exploring how our interactivity building tool can dramatically improve your training effectiveness today, download the free trial.

To find out more such success stories of Raptivity, visit the case studies section.

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Nominate Raptivity at the Ed-Tech Readers’ Choice Awards

By poonam on April 12, 2012 in , , , , , , , , ,

Last couple of days left to support your favorite interactivity builder. By doing so, you would share your choice of interactive building tool with fellow eLearning professionals. You can support Raptivity software by just filling out the simple nomination form. This Readers' Choice Awards 2012will help your favorite ed-tech product to win the 2012-2013 Readers’ Choice Awards.

This is a very short form with only one open-ended question. You just need to spend 5 minutes to fill the form and vote for Raptivity. The deadline for nominations is Friday, April 20th, 2012.

Please click on the link below to access the nomination form:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/rca2013/  or copy and paste the above link in your browser.

We look forward to your enthusiastic participation and valuable contribution to the eLearning community!! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@raptivity.com

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Thinning line between Interactivity and Interaction

By poonam on April 4, 2012 in , , , , , , ,

Today, we have more choices to learn in an exciting and interactive environment compared to a decade back. Engaging lesson content and varied devices such as laptops, tablets, PDAs, and smart phones for accessing such content has brought about a new approach to teaching and learning. Irrespective of the teacher being present, lessons are being imparted in an asynchronous environment. Interactive courseware allows students to actively participate in the learning process and retain the knowledge learned through the use of simple and easy modes.

Interaction Vs Interactivity Interactivity has been the key component for such remarkable changes in the modes of imparting and accessing education. The meaning of ‘interactivity’ has grown ginormously. Before we take a leap further, we need to understand the concept of interactivity and interactions in its entirety as the dividing line between the two is sure to vanish in the near future.

Interactivity is more than a rendition of a lecture or piece of information. It is creation of a platform where the learners are more than passive listeners. They engage with the lesson which is responsive to their actions. It therefore, results in greater understanding and retention of the lesson and helps the learners overcome their trivial errors.

The interactivity potential is yet to be fully realized in the sphere of teaching and learning. Most of us have also been under the impression that computer based eLearning is interactivity. But, in fact that is so very untrue as eLearning merely allows the learner to browse the content on a computer, laptop or a handheld. This meaning of eLearning is not compatible with the concept of interactivity as explained above. Interactivity is more fun and makes the learners interested, curious, engaged and challenged in any setting be it the classroom or online classroom. In short, Interactivity is explicit interaction which leads to direct response and direct commentary.

An interaction on the other hand, is a learning activity where the learner is presented with a scenario. In this scenario, the learning goal is set which the learner tries to accomplish with actions and informative instructions from time to time. The key to the creation of a good interaction is that it should not be overtly filled with gimmicks and should have a defined purpose. It should be designed to maintain the learner’s interest till the activity ends.

For instance, interactions can be in the form of simulations, games, quizzes, virtual worlds, etc. The possibilities are infinite but selection of the right set is again very daunting for any instructional course designer. Interactions have to be engaging as they keep the learner mentally stimulated during the learning process/activity.

With the current usage of interactions and interactivity in eLearning and mobile learning courses, the difference between the two is somewhere dwindling. Nevertheless, we need to remember that Interactivity is a process oriented action and interaction is the means to accomplish such processes. What really matters is that both these terms are crucial to an eLearning course and it completes the interactive learning experience for the learner.

 

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Did-you-Know Raptivity 7.0

By poonam on March 30, 2012 in , , , , , , ,

It is the start of summer and the Raptivity team is very happy to announce its latest contribution to the forefront of interactivity with new enhanced features of Raptivity version 7.0 which incorporates various features based on the inputs received from our customers globally. We reckon to get you acquainted with them so that you have a brief overview of these features and use them to create engaging and interactive course content in minimum time and resources.

Interactivity is a key component used to enable the learning process in the world of eLearning and mobile learning. However, if interactivity isn’t integrated into eLearning, the end user may not be able to experience learning as should be the case otherwise. That is one of the key reasons why Raptivity is always a favorite among teachers, course creators and instructional designers due to the easy user-interface and reduced turnaround time in creating interactions from scratch.

Raptivity 7.0

The devoted users would be overwhelmed with the new features of Raptivity 7.0. So, let’s explore it more with the help of a whitepaper titled “Lightning Tips on using Raptivity Effectively”. This whitepaper solely explains the six new features of Raptivity 7.0 and also provides handy step-by-step description for using them. These features have definitely passed all endurance tests before being offered to Raptivity users and would help in overcoming many challenges faced by teachers and instructional designers in developing highly interactive and engaging course material.

We hope that Raptivity users explore and use these new features in varied ways for creation of interaction models. We are sure that our readers will be delighted with this new version of Raptivity and share it with their friends and colleagues. Download the whitepaper here and do share new ideas and suggestions by writing to our Program Manager at idea@raptivity.com .

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How to Design an E-Learning Course?

By Rakesh Shinde on March 22, 2012 in , , , , , , , ,

Being a Senior Graphic Designer, you tend to gather a lot of insights on tricks and new processes in creating interactive eLearning courses.  It isn’t easy to create an interactive educational course as it sounds but there is always a way to go about it. From the experience gathered, I will be sharing some interesting tips and tricks in course designing and how to build one from scratch.

Course designing for eLearning is similar to synchronization of many characters in a play. The play is a hit when all the characters have portrayed their roles without any dubiousness. Likewise, eLearning course designing is very challenging for any instructional designer. You may have numerous ideas on designing a course but when you start to implement it, you are not sure of where to start from and which tools to use. In such cases, the best thing to do is follow the design cycle. This design cycle is a systematic way of putting your creative thoughts into tangible designs for interactive eLearning. Let’s get you acquainted with the seven steps of the cycle of design:

E-Learning Design Cycle Process

Fig.1: Interactive eLearning Course Design Cycle

 

1) Screen Capture:

Firstly, you need to find the appropriate images or you can create your own images by drawing the sketches. You can even download the images from websites or image portals such as fotolia, gettyimages, shutterstock, corbisimages, etc.

Screen Capture

Fig.2 Screen Capture

 

2) Image Editing:

The next thing to do is to tidy up the selected images. When the images are edited, the benefits reaped are that images have more finesse, sharpness, texture and are re-contextualized.

Editiing of an Image

Fig.3 Editing images to give them the final touch as per your design

 

3) Audio and Video Recording:

Based on the requirement of the course, one can add videos and audios to make them interactive. To create good quality audio and video clips one can use the audio and video recorder. For instance, you can use the handy cam, digital video recorder etc or even tools such as screen recorders could be used for creating software simulations and other interactions. Make sure to save them in formats such as .avi, .wmv, .flv, .mpg, .3gp, .mp4, .mov as these are supported by many common tools.

4) Special Artifact Creation: 

“An artifact is anything crafted by human hand that is left behind.” So, from the course designing perspective, this artifact could be a product, a training manual, help documentation, project management documentation, or anything else which is tangible. Most of the time artifacts are documentation or diagrams of some sort but they can also be the finished product or some piece of the finished product such as building simulation using Adobe Captivate, avatar building using tools like codebaby, etc.

5) Rapid Interactivity Building:

Rapid interactivity building is creation of an instructionally sound, customized and trackable interaction quickly and easily without any flash programming. Using tools such as Raptivity for interactivity building, course creators can have complete control over the look and feel of the interactions. They can choose from the library of interactions, customize it and publish it in a format which is ready to be used with numerous e-Learning tools.

One should enjoy the versatility of rapid interactivity building tool – Raptivity. The tool works great because you can select the right set of interactions based on various instructional design theories without learning to program the courses in Flash or HTML5 format.

Rapid interactivity builder

Fig.4 Screenshot of Raptivity – Rapid Interactivity Builder

 

6) Content Authoring and Integration:

Content authoring tool is a software application used to create subject specific online content typically for delivery on the World Wide Web (www). Content authoring tools also allow you to create content in other file formats so that the training can be delivered on a CD (compact disc) or in other formats for various uses.

Now, there is a slight difference between course-authoring tools and content-authoring tools which is unknown to many of us. Course-authoring tools allow to create online courses, while content-authoring tools allow to create subject specific online content. Normally, subject specific online content have less features and functionality in comparison with an online course created with a course-authoring tool. Again, this depends upon the software used to create the content. Authoring tools like Elicitus is a good choice for trainers, educators, subject matter experts and other e-learning creators. It requires no programming and even users with no page design experience can create visually appealing courses with it. Let’s take a look at the “Professional Edge Medical Terminology” course designed using Elicitus.

At this stage, one should assemble all the artifacts, interactions, images and videos created in earlier stages. Authoring tool helps put together all these things to create an interactive eLearning course.

7) Testing E-Learning Course

Lastly, the final stage is testing which makes sure that the course works perfectly fine on LMS and various browsers. ‘Testing’ refers to the ability for a course, web application, HTML construct or JavaScript to support all the web browsers. Testing helps a course designer to enhance course accuracy and reduce cost of producing quality course.

With this highly illustrative cycle of design, you can make good quality educational courses for audiences from eLearning and mLearning platforms with minimum fret and a good set of tools. I hope you find this process insightful. Looking forward to your queries and comments below. You can also write to me at info@raptivity.com.

 

 

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Statistics on Implementing Interactive Mobile Learning

By poonam on March 16, 2012 in , , , , , , ,

The launch webinar of Raptivity Essential HTML5 support did bring in a lot of eLearning enthusiasts and industry professionals across three continents (US, Europe and Australia). Raptivity Team was intrigued with the real-time poll results collated during the webinar “Get started with HTML5 using Raptivity Interactions” held on 6th March, 2012. Since the webinar started with a poll, the results were an eye-opener for all the eLearning professionals and even others who are still in the primary phase of implementing mobile learning or are contemplating doing so.

The figure 1 displays the poll question asked during the webinar.

Poll Question on mLearning

Figure 1. Poll Question

The poll question was “At what stage is your organization in implementing M-Learning?”. Figure 2 shown below highlights the results collected from all 3 continents.

 Poll Results of mLearning

Figure 2: Poll Results gathered from in 3 Continents

The most noticeable factor is the fact that majority of the audience are currently evaluating mobile learning solutions throughout USA, Australia and Europe. Likewise, 20% of the audience were equally ignorant about mobile learning and its various advantages. This is an interesting finding as probably most of us were under the impression that with the influx of latest mobile devices, the demand for mLearning solutions is growing in leaps and bounds. But that’s not the case. People are still evaluating mLearning and its options.

Now, the poll question results also show a similarity across three continents when it comes to analyzing the usage of mLearning courses on mobile devices. This shows that though the demand for high end mobile devices and tablets is on the rise, the usage of such devices for learning and accessing engaging mLearning courses is very low. It is challenging for eLearning enthusiasts, schools, colleges and universities to build rapid interactive and educationally oriented mLearning courses at a faster pace and increase their audience in numbers. Number of tools available for creating mLearning faster and in an effective way is definitely an important consideration.

Lastly, there are also many people who are still at the discussion phase and unsure about opting for mLearning solutions. Here, you will find a spike in the number of people from Europe compared to USA and Australia. This also throws light on the fundamental fact that the number of people discussing about mobile learning solutions is higher in Europe today and increases the probability of them using mLearning solutions in the near future at a much faster pace.

The results were indeed impressive and we are rest assured seeing the results that mLearning is slowly gaining momentum. To view the exciting results of these polls during the webinar you can access the recording here.

 

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Launch of World’s Largest HTML5 Interaction Library

By poonam on March 8, 2012 in , , , , , , , , , , ,

Raptivity Team would like to extend a very warm thank you for sharing your time with us by participating enthusHTML5 Webinariastically for the launch webinar of Raptivity v7.0 organized on 6th March, 2012. The theme for the webinar was “Get started with HTML5 using Raptivity Interactions”. It was conducted in three different time zones catering to eLearning enthusiasts from three continents viz; USA, Europe and Australia. The interactive session was all about mobile learning and specifically the HTML5 capabilities of Raptivity. The webinar attracted a good number of industry professionals which made the ‘question hour’ session very interactive.

The webinar started off with a poll and the results were an eye opener. The results of the poll will be shared soon in the next week’s follow-up blog. The figure 1 listed below is a snapshot of the poll question asked during the webinar.

Poll Question

Figure 1. Poll Question

Many crucial topics related to mobile learning were discussed such as benefits of including interaction in mLearning, definition and comparison of three common outputs of mLearning, etc. A brief overview of Raptivity features along with the HTML5 publishing was demonstrated during the webinar. A sample course that was built with Raptivity Essential HTML5 interactions was also showcased which captivated the audience.

Finally, the session was wrapped up by sharing information on how one can get HTML5 interaction templates in their eLearning toolkit. This was followed up by an interactive Q&A session where numerous queries from the audience were aptly answered by the hosts.

If you have missed the action, don’t worry as we have recorded the webinar for your offline viewing. You can also write to us at info@raptivity.com for your queries regarding Raptivity HTML5 templates.

 

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Webinar on HTML5 Interactions developed by Raptivity

By poonam on February 29, 2012 in , , , , , , , , , ,

HTML5 is fast emerging as the industry standard for building rich interfaces. However, there are quite a few technical challenges while developing content in HTML5 and not all browsers support this format consistently for instance; the video support is limited and many more such issues. With Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iPod devices choosing HTML5 over Adobe Flash, HTML5 has the potential to become an important factor in all the upcoming classes of portable devices.

Em-Learning Webinarvery eLearning developer and course creator today has many queries about HTML5 – its usage, benefits, issues, etc. They are in search of a wholesome solution that creates engaging HTML5 compliant interactions. Raptivity leads the eLearning domain with its foray in mobile learning. It will be releasing its latest version of Raptivity 7.0 in the first week of March 2012 which will have the world’s largest library of eLearning interactions for iPhone, iPad and other cutting-edge mobile computing products. On that account, to get you acquainted with the HTML5 interactions, Raptivity team has organized a special webinar on the 6th March, 2012. This webinar will provide an overview of the latest features of Raptvity 7.0 and showcase the HTML5 interactions live in action.

The webinar, “Get started with HTML5 using Raptivity Interactions”, is taking place on Tuesday, March 06, 2012, in three different time zones. The rich presentation will be followed by an interactive Q&A session. Join us as we outline an eLearning course with HTML5 interactions and make it compliant for use even on mobile platforms. Check out the timings for the webinar in three different time zones on the 6th March:

1) Click here to register for US Friendly timings: 11:00 am – 12:00 am PST

2) Click here to register for Europe friendly timings: 10:00 am – 11:00 am CET

3) Click here to register for Australia friendly timings: 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm AEDT

The one hour session will allow the attendees experience: 

  1. 35 interaction templates with HTML5 publishing option.
  2. How to convert your existing Raptivity Flash interactions to HTML5?
  3. Tracking HTML5 interactions using SCORM 1.2 and 2004 standards.
  4. Publishing of Flash and HTML5 based interactions in a single click.
  5. Sample HTML5 courses created using Raptivity interactions.

So, quickly register to qualify for a special early bird discount to be announced during the webinar. Looking forward to meeting you all at the webinar.