There have been significant developments in the eLearning industry as a whole. Despite that, there are many challenges especially when it comes to marketing eLearning within organizations.

There are largely three barriers to the employee adoption of eLearning. Let’s take a look at them individually.

Self-driven learners as a new concept: Learning or Training was traditionally imparted as an instructor-led initiative. Expecting the learners to take the initiative in acquiring knowledge is not always positively received. More so in the context of an organization; where it could be construed as an additional burden to their increasing workload by the employees. Besides, the concept of self-driven learners is fairly new. Employees still expect organizations to drive the learning initiative. This lack of drive translates into poor adoption.

eLearning Champions missing: It has been demonstrated in various universities that the role of eLearning champions is immense when it comes to promoting an eLearning initiative. However, in the corporate world it is not easy to identify an eLearning champion. Most stakeholders do commit initially to supporting this initiative, but as time goes on if there is no highly visible ROI, they drop out. In the absence of an ongoing champion, it is very difficult to make the eLearning initiative succeed.

eLearning courseware uninspiring: One of the biggest challenge that hampers the marketing of eLearning within an organization is poorly designed courseware. Even the best of marketing effort will fail if the product being marketed is of poor quality. This applies to eLearning as well. You only have to think of the many times you made a purchasing decision based on advertising, only to be disappointed when the product didn’t measure up to your expectations or quality standards.

It is not sufficient for organizations to launch an eLearning initiative within an organization. They cannot take employee participation for granted just because the learning program caters to their training requirements. Organizations need to have a planned marketing initiative wherein the benefits of eLearning to the employees need to be clearly spelled out.

Related posts:

1. Role of Champions in eLearning Adoption
2. 9 Strategies for Marketing eLearning to Employees
3. Why market eLearning?

Adode Captivate is the most preferred tool as it allows creating dynamic and engaging projects in a single software package with ease. By using Adobe Captivate, course developers can create application trainings and software tutorials easily and quickly. Let’s look at a few benefits and limitations of Adobe Captivate:

• Use this tool to develop Software Simulations for eLearning courses.
• Develop quizzes quickly using inbuilt tools. It has a good collection of assessments.
• Customizable widgets – Add actions to objects (e.g. hide on click).
• Closed caption text-synch with animation.

But, its uniqueness of being ideal for software simulations also becomes its limitation. This tool is not ideal for soft skills training though you can develop such courses if you have only this tool at your disposal and have such a need.

However, the ideal use for Captivate would be for rapid elearning development and when you need application and software simulations.

Related posts:

1. Software Product Simulation – Captivate or Flash?
2. Pros and Cons of Articulate Studio ‘09, Lectora, and Adobe Captivate
3. 5 Key Criteria for the Selection of eLearning Authoring Tools

Social media is being widely used to support learning. It has evolved into a powerful tool for training and learning professionals. Social media offers new opportunities to share knowledge and experiences in fun and exciting ways. Today, let’s look at how social media can be used during the various phases of a typical training cycle.

Social Media and Marketing Training

Let’s begin with using social media for marketing or promoting training events. You can use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs to share and hyper distribute information through:

• Announcements and promotions
• Reminders
• Generating excitement

You can use YouTube to give your learners a sneak preview of the training program or a taste of what is to come through videos. This can draw your audience to more formal learning, such as a full-blown online course or a live instructor-led workshop. Quick product demos are particularly effective for posting on YouTube before learners take the full course.

Social Media and Needs Analysis

Assume you have a focus group set up on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for your potential users. You can now go ahead and do the following:

Brainstorm on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for your training needs. This will help you:

• Nail down performance gaps
• Collate best practices on developing ideal skill sets and benchmark performances
• It can also help you bridge the gap between real and ideal job performance

You can also use discussion groups on LinkedIn and Facebook to collect top-of-mind objectives for any training requirement and arrive at estimates of a typical duration for courses based on scope and subject.

Social Media and Learning Design

Now let us look at the ways of using social media in design. But first, let’s take a quick look at the trends in Rapid eLearning Development.

• There is a clear shift towards shorter byte-sized courses (5-15 minutes, instead of the typical 30-60 minutes).
• There is two-way linking from courses to social media and vice versa.
• There are multiple formats for the same learning material to accommodate various learning styles and multiple delivery channels.

To use social media in learning design, you can use it to initiate discussions and check archives for the following:

• Design ideas from the community
• Real life scenarios
• Inputs and validation of types of interactivity and exercises
• And inputs and validation of test questions (you can get real-life questions from users)

You can also use social media to get a wealth of reusable assets in the form of YouTube videos and pieces of content, Flash objects from blogs and so on.

Social Media and Evaluation

Evaluate all aspects of your courses through surveys and polls which you can promote through Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, e-mails and blogs. You can get this feedback both from your learners as well as the training fraternity.

You can also get further inputs to refine courses, such as:

• Consolidate further learning through ongoing discussions as learners start applying learning to real life
• Get learners to blog their learning experiences
• Provide further focused learning inputs through blogs
• Follow Subject Matter Experts
• Use social media to send out FAQs of common questions that arise in training

Social Media and Rewards

Now, coming to rewards and recognitions for successful learners. You can use social media to:

• Hand out rewards and recognitions
• Celebrate success stories on training

So, you can get started soon and create accounts on social networking sites for your employees. You can create training-related pages for your organizations and encourage your employees to use social media for learning.

Related posts:

1. Social Media – Transforming Learning In The Workplace
2. Benefits of Using Social Media for Learning
3. Five Social Media Marketing Tips for the e-learning Industry

Articulate is a suite of comprehensive yet easy-to-use set of e-learning development tools. It is used to convert power point presentations directly to create an e-learning course. Articulate Rapid eLearning Studio Professional, known as the market leader in rapid e-learning software, is an integrated authoring suite with applications such as Articulate Presenter, Articulate Quizmaker, and Articulate Engage.

The three applications in Articulate are:

• Presenter: Users can create e-learning courses by adding narration and interactivity to a PowerPoint file.
• Quizmaker: Users can create highly customized Flash-based quizzes and assessments.
• Engage: Users can create highly interactive learning modules.

Articulate is a great tool for rapidly creating flash-based eLearning courses. Many organizations are using this tool for rapid development. A few advantages of this tool are:

• It has the ability to easily convert PowerPoint presentations into eLearning courses that are graphically rich and interactive.
• It has a set of pre-defined interactivities.
• It is easy to create quick assessments – You can use a variety of quiz questions by using Articulate Quizmaker.
• Finally, this tool is ideal for entry level use.

The disadvantages are:

• It has a limited set of interactivities, which are rigid and cannot be customized. For instance if you have a page with 5 pre-defined tabs and you want to add an extra tab, you can’t. The tool doesn’t allow it.
• Navigation, options and Templates are highly limited.
• And it is not ideal for text heavy courses.
• Output will be as good as your ability with using key features of PowerPoint.

Thus Articulate is ideal to use for rapid elearning development, quick assessments and quick briefings – product knowledge, simple scenarios. And with articulate, authors can be comfortable and creative with designing in PPT. Ideal for entry-level use.

Related posts:

1. The Unique Benefits and Limitations of Flash
2. 5 Key Criteria for the Selection of eLearning Authoring Tools
3. The Unique Benefits and Limitations of Adobe Captivate

Hello! Today we will learn about how we can use Lectora translation tool for rapid development of translations. In this blog, I will show you one page translation procedure demo using Lectora 2008.

Let’s translate one page of English course into Simplified Chinese.

First, we need to export all the content into the translation text file. This can be done easily using the inbuilt tool available in Lectora.

Click on the Tools menu item from the Menu bar, and then click on the Translation Tool menu item.

The Translation Tool dialog opens. In the dialog box, choose the ‘Export text to a translation file’ option. Next check ‘The current page only’ option; since this is a demo, we are translating only one (current page) only.

Click on the ‘Browse’ button for the location to save the exported text file. Enter the file name and click on ‘Open’ and then click the ‘OK’ button.

At the end of the procedure, you will be able to see the exported file. Let’s view the text file.

In the document, you will come across instructions like ‘Do not edit this line’ in red. The translators need to be informed about not to delete or translate these instructions. They need to translate only the text below the instruction line.

Let’s have a look at the document translated by the translator. Here is the translated file, Click to view the document. Except for the instructions line, the text is translated into Simplified Chinese language.

After we receive the translated document, we need to import it into the Lectora to replace the English content with Simplified Chinese. Let’s see how to do it.

Again click on the ‘Tools’ menu item from the ‘Menu’ options and then click on the ‘Translation Tool’ menu item.

Next, check the radio button next to ‘Import text from a translation file’. Check the ‘Increase text box size if needed’ option to adjust the text size of the translated content automatically by Lectora.

Click on the ‘The current page only’ option to import as this is a demo.

Click on ‘Browse’ button to locate the translated file and then click on ‘OK’ ‘button. The translated content will replace the text content in the original language on the page.

Check for any formatting / alignment issues. Similarly you can do it for the entire course.

If you need to localize the course you can replace the images and other objects like Flash, manually. Once you are finished with editing the text and localizing the content, the course is ready to publish.

Related posts:

1. How to design Translation File Format for Multi-lingual elearning Courseware Development?
2. How to Customize the Questions Functionality using Variables in Lectora?
3. How to make Lectora Courses Compatible to Cross LMS?