Rollovers are one of the most frequently used components in Lectora. They are similar to ‘Click on tabs’ but differ in the way the action takes place. Here, the content gets displayed when the learners rollover their mouse over the images. This feature is used when one has to show parts of a product or demonstrate the different components in a software program.

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Lectora is the authoring tool I recommend most highly for e-learning when there is a lot of content on the screen. It is also recommended for users with low Internet bandwidth and for the ease of translations. It is very easy to develop Flash interactivities using Adobe Flash and integrate them into Lectora, but the concern here would be loading of Flash interactivities which could create problems for learners.

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Here are a few typical scenarios for training and let’s see which authoring tool would be most appropriate for eLearning development in such situations.

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One of our Fortune client based in USA raised an issue regarding compatibility of AICC courses on their LMS. The courses were published using Captivate Authoring tool. The client proposed CommLab to fix this issue in the courses. Nearly 100 courses were in queue and the client was not able to launch them because of this issue.

When we took up this assignment, we were a little confused on where to start our research and how to solve this issue. On the other hand it was a very challenging task because we have to work on the coding of an authoring tool to make the courses function properly on the LMS. Earlier, we had the experience of working on coding side of another authoring tool. It was proprietary tool and the courses published by the tool ran on a particular portal. It was really a tough time to work on that tool.

To solve the Captivate issue; we planned a strategy which consists of three stages:

1. We will search for the solution in search engines with similar issues
2. We will go through the coding of Captivate course and try to fix the issue
3. We will implement our own AICC wrapper in-between the coding generated by Captivate

In our first stage, we were able to find out some information regarding AICC compatibility issue with regards to Captivate. Then in the second stage we went through the coding of the course to understand the flow of AICC and we could successfully figure out the reason for this issue.

The actual issue in the course was the AICC URL. The course was not able to get the correct AICC URL. Finally the courses worked fine on the Client LMS.

We worked on this assignment for around 8-10 hours and at the end of the project we were little happy and little disappointed. Happy because the project is closed successfully and disappointed because at the end, what we changed in the coding was just one line!!!

Actual code:
strURLParams = (strURLParams==unescape(strURLParams)?escape(strURLParams):strURLParams);

Modified code:
//strURLParams = (strURLParams==unescape(strURLParams)?escape(strURLParams):strURLParams);

On the other hand, I think we should really cheer for the success because even though it is only one line, the client was not able to launch their courses. And we helped the client to solve his problem and launch his courses.

Hope this article is helpful to you!

Cheers!

Syed Amjad Ali
Manager – Technology