eLearning DevCon 2007 - Articles - Zimbio

FREE Webinar - Synchronous Learning - Hear from the experts

Sat, 8 Jul 2007 23:24:00 GMT

posted by garinhess

(Full Disclosure: I am a full time employee of The eLearning Guild)

Synchronous Learning is still HUGE. Sure, we may not be meeting in the same room synchronously, but we meet and learn in virtual rooms. Virtual, online, synchronous learning is powerful, cheap, and easier than ever before. But there are many facts, myths, and concerns swirling around the industry. Ask the experts yourself during this synchronous discussion of the report.

You don't want to miss the FREE Webinar on synchronous learning this Tuesday.
REGISTER HERE
There will be 2 webinars: 8:30am and 11:30am PDT

It's also never too late to complete the synchronous learning survey. The eLearning Guild encourages continuous updates of the surveys.Published by eLearning DevCon and Rapid Intake Inc. 2006 Copyright all rights reserved. http://www.elearndevcon.com http://www.rapidintake.com

Educational Technology in E-Assessment: Focused on the Performance of eLearning

Sat, 28 Sep 2008 01:58:04 GMT

posted by WPeterson

From the definition of E-assessment from Wikipedia, we can see the advantages of deploying an e-testing system are obvious: lower long-term cost, instant feedback, great flexibility, improved reliability and enhanced question styles. We, especially teachers, cannot refuse so many advantages here over traditional assessment. With some authoring tools, we may create high quality assessment items with IMS Question and Test Interoperability specification to evaluate students’ learning progress. But here is NOT the end of E-assessment. As the assessing part of eLearning, the tests creation and participation is just the method. We really need the test results of the e-assessment to evaluate how students learnt.

This is an interesting topic as I posted “The Way Scoring Test in eLearning” days ago. Actually we believe that teachers can collect all test results manually via E-Mail. We know, it’s complicated and not intuitive with enormous results data to analyze comprehensively. As I claimed in a previous training article “Online Training Needs Assessments“, those educational technologies help us implement the accessing part. I completely agree that we should use extensive statistics and analysis tools, which contains valuable information based on trends analysis, and the details you can look up. Back to the beginning, these information we got really helps us evaluate the performance of eLearning, whatever how great your online courses and online assessments are.

More information about Quiz Management System for eLearning performance:
http://www.sameshow.com/quiz-creator/quiz-online-reporting-system.html

Just Turn Your Microsoft SharePoint Server into An Online Learning Center

Sat, 28 Sep 2008 01:58:04 GMT

posted by WPeterson

Many times some clients asked me about how to set up their existing Microsoft SharePoint server as a Learning Management System to implement eLearning instantly, such as they want to “Make SCORM Compliant Quiz for LMS to Evaluate Online Learning Performance“. Actually the key points the SharePoint users want are: content management, instructor/learner workflows, and assignment, tracking and grading learning content. As we cannot directly rebuild SharePoint anyway, Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit could be the enough solution.

As a project in CodePlex, SharePoint Learning Kit is a SCORM 2004 certified e-learning delivery and tracking application built as a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 solution. We know that, with the SCORM package support, we can do a lot of e-learning activities on the server: assigning courses & assessments, tracking status and scores.

Certainly, the SCORM support learning kit for SharePoint is still under development, so we cannot seriously compare Microsoft SharePoint with industry leading LMS such as Blackboard. Besides, if you’re looking for the results reporting solution for online assessment, just refer to Report Wisely: Make Sense of Your Online Assessment Results.

Make Multiple Choice Questions in Online Quizzes for Quick Assessment

Sat, 28 Sep 2008 01:58:04 GMT

posted by WPeterson

Online quizzes have become essential for teachers to assess distance students quickly and efficiently. The multiple choice questions in online quizzes are the easiest way to implement quick assessment on learning performance. One of the main benefit from using multiple choice questions (MCQ) with online quiz systems is automated marking. That is, the result of multiple choice questions can be reviewed instantly and automatically.

How to Make Multiple Choice Questions in Online Quizzes
1. Select your quiz tool to start creating online quizzes, here just take Wondershare QuizCreator (http://www.sameshow.com/quiz-creator.html) as example;
2. Add “Multiple Choice” question type, and enter your question and answers. Then mark the correct answer(s) for single answer or multiple answers;
3. Certainly you can enhance the multiple choice quiz with images, audio clips or Flash animations.
4. With setting up the included reporting service Quiz Management System (http://www.sameshow.com/quiz-creator/quiz-online-reporting-system.html), the score statistics of multiple choice questions will be generated automatically as easy-to-understand report for you to review.

Below is a sample of multiple choice question quiz created by Wondershare QuizCreator. And you can try to answer it and get the feedback instantly.

Web as Desktop: Live Presentations on the Web!

Sat, 28 Sep 2008 01:58:04 GMT

posted by WPeterson

Are you suffering the high cost and continual repetition of live presentations?
“As a president, I always join many meetings and trade shows to present our products or corporation. There is no problem with the live presentation. But I’m stuck when I want to sharing the meeting with others after it. Because I need present the same presentation again and again even spend additional high costs on driving or flying. The boring continual repetition makes me crazy. Is there any way to take my live presentation to the web? – Mr. Cooper”

PowerPoint is still the most popular tool for presentations now. It could integrate images, movies, narrations, animations to make the presentation animated and interactive. But the PowerPoint file is big and hard to share on the web, hard to integrate with the presenter’s video and narration to live up the presentation.

How to distribute the live presentations to web to reduce the cost?
As everybody knows that, web presentation is a big cost and time saving solution. If we could run the presentation with the presenter’s video and narration online, it will be perfect. The difficulty of the web presentation is hard to integrate the presenter’s video and narration along with the PowerPoint presentation content. Is there any way to fix this problem?

A brand new service gives you an easy-to-use way to integrate the presenter’s video with PowerPoint slideshows, sharing the results online. This simple tool makes it a piece of cake to run the presenter’s video content side-by-side with PowerPoint presentations. So the audience could get the presentation running alongside with presenter’s video and narration in action, likes that the presenter stands by them. This really has the power to bring online presentations to life.

There are many tools such as Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional and services like Omnisio, Zentation to integrate the video along with the PowerPoint slideshows. Here is the comparability of the two ways.

PPT2Flash Professional converts the PowerPoint presentations to Flash with presenter’s video and narration in one click. It works as a PowerPoint add-in. Presenter could easily distribute the Flash presentations to their website or training center for sharing. The Flash format is safer and smaller for web distribution.

Learn more about Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional from: http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash-pro.html

View samples from here: http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash/samples.html

Omnisio and Zentation are simple online applications for the synchronization and sharing of the Slideshare-hosted PowerPoint decks and Google Video-hosted content. You could upload your video to Youtube and then upload the PowerPoint presentation to Slideshare, use Omnisio and Zentation to synchronization them together. They will generate one webpage for you. You could share the content with others on this webpage.

For inner continual presentations, PPT2Flash Professional seems a better solution.
For external one time presentation, Omnisio and Zentation are better solutions.