Created a few learning interactions today

When I started Ramen, one of the goals was to allow the page templates/interactions to be used outside of the system – in a Lectora course for example. This has even become more important as my day job standardizes on Lectora as the shell for any tracked learning content. Over the past year, I’ve been able to write a whole lot of really easy to use APIs for creating learning interactions. Creating a new interaction takes just a few hours using the Ramen page template API and borrowing functionality from existing templates.

The biggest benefit of this is quick and easy reusability. Just change the XML file and it’s a new page. I don’t want to even think about how hard  some of these would be to pull of in Lectora. It gets really confusing when the action icons start to pile up.

I’m helping out on a project now that needs a few learning interactions developed – quickly. So I spent today working on these. Here they are in the Ramen player:

These aren’t the fanciest interactions ever created, but not bad for a few hours work.

6 Comments

  1. Yeah that drag and drop for the fill-in-the-blanks is a really great way to do it.

    I’m surprised you guys use Lectora at all, considering you guys at BoA are top-notch coders (well, at least you and Jason are).

    Is Lectora standardized simply to eliminate any the SCORM/LMS integration issues?

    Reply

    1. Thanks!

      It’s our standard tool for a few reasons: easy for the masses to use (we have over 40 elearning devs), support from the vendor, standardized SCORM tracking, control of the authoring process and output. I’m sure a few more.

      Reply

  2. Would you recommend it? I am moving into a supervisory role soon and unfortunately won’t be able to do any more development during my day job. For years now I’ve been the only one doing any elearning design/dev (the typical one-man shop) and just did everything from scratch using Flash and Captivate. None of the people who will be taking over for me have any real development experience outside of PowerPoint. We have Adobe Presenter but it is buggy and quite limited. I was thinking of getting them licenses to Articulate, but I’d like to have something a bit more powerful so that eventually they can learn.

    Reply

    1. In that situation, I’d recommend it. It’s a hard tool for power users to develop with (any “rapid dev” tool is) but for people just getting started it really is the best out there right now.

      Articulate is faster, but it’s a lot more limiting in the long run if you’re looking to grow as a developer.

      Reply

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