Good news! I’ve finally been able to access both pieces of software I am using to design my project, the learning management system and Articulate. I will talk about my experience with both.

The LMS has finally been started after executing the contract at the beginning of September. We are using Litmos. I have been learning its capabilities and using it, like doing bulk upload of learners and putting them into teams. The LMS also came preloaded with 250 learning modules of decent quality. Unfortunately, they are completely uncategorized, so I will have to go through each one to put it into a category and also activate them. This is a huge flaw with the software, and I have advised my peers in sister portfolio companies not to use Litmos for this reason. I don’t have time to tag 250 videos and neither does anyone else. I also have put together my first learning module using the software. The results were not spectacular. It really looked like amateur hour! Moodle, the free LMS, delivers more visually striking modules, and that software is free and open source. But I suppose the main purpose of an LMS is to track learners, and it looks like it will be sufficient for that.

The second software I have been working with is Articulate Rise. Wow, this is great stuff! It produces absolutely beautiful learning modules and is so easy to use. I have used several different templates just to see what they do. The block template is my favorite. Each page is a screen, and the next page scrolls up smoothly and quickly. I have been able to embed videos and select photos from the library. I’ve also constructed quizzes. It has a really cool hot button feature that creates pop-ups for additional information.

For the design process this week, I created two modules. The first was for the LMS and the second was for Articulate. For both modules I created Prezis and then used Screencast-o- Matic to record my voice over them. I also delivered both modules live with remote attendees using GoToMeeting. For the online modules, I cut the recordings into smaller pieces using YouTube tools to cut them into individual topics. Here the process for the two platforms diverged. For the LMS, I uploaded the videos, interspersing each topic with quizzes and readings. It looked bad and the transitions were not smooth. I also had trouble with the pages displaying on the screen and had to contact customer support who still has not fixed it. For Articulate, I used the block function I described above to build the module. I added text, screen shots of Word documents, stock images supplied by the program, and quizzes. The final product was beautiful and easy for the learner to navigate!

I have described above what did not work with the LMS, but for Articulate, the program worked really easily. There was only one problem with it. It does not accept .doc or .pdf uploaded. That’s a huge pain!!!! I had to do some fancy work-arounds to get that media to upload into the program.

For now, I’m just going to keep building out the entire training. I have three more modules to build, and I will most likely still with Articulate and perhaps rebuild the ugly LMS module using Articulate, too .