Over the past week or so I have sent over some content to Litmos so they can show off the beta of their new mobile app that can play and track Articulate content on mobile devices that support the Flash Player.  Well last night Litmos founder @richchetwynd posted the video below showing Articulate Quizmaker working on his Google Nexus One.

This is awesome and is making me want to get a Nexus One  Check it out:

Mobile SCORM tracking of Flash based content on the Google NexusOne phone from Litmos Team on Vimeo.

We (at Articulate) are working on developing some Screenr screencasts that show you how you can upload and track Articulate content in various Learning Management Systems.  I got a head start on the project by doing a screencast on tracking Quizmaker in Moodle a couple of weeks back.  In this screencast I am going to show you how you can upload and track Quizmaker ‘09 content in Dokeos.

Dokeos is a Free Open Source LMS like Moodle.  Doesn’t contain nearly the feature set of Moodle, but it is a little simpler to use.  Enjoy the demo!

3 1/2 years ago I blogged about uploading an Articulate Quizmaker to Moodle.  It has been one of my most popular and heavily commented on posts.  In this post I wanted to revist that demo.  I used Captivate at the time to create the demo, so I wanted to redo the demo using Screenr, and add some narration.

Old School Learning Tools

1. Articulate Studio ‘09. Hands down, the best eLearning toolset on the market  How about that for a completely unbiased opinion from the QA Manager for 3 out of the 4 tools in the suite?  Honestly, I do think it is the best eLearning toolset on the market or I wouldn’t work at Articulate.  We offer great support, and make products that are so easy to learn even your grandma could use them.
2. Wordpress. It is impossible to ignore what blogs have done for eLearning, and how can my list be complete without including the BEST Blogging software.  Wordpress.
3. Twitter. This choice might turn some heads…you might be thinking, how does constant updates from Ashton Kutcher and Shaq facilitate learning?  Good question…it depends on how you use Twitter.  If you only follow the tweeps like Shaq or Ashton Kutcher you probably aren’t going to gain much from it, and you probably don’t have a whole lot of friends (Ok, I admit it, I follow Shaq).  However, if you use Twitter to connect, share, and ask advice from other professionals in your industry it can be an invaluable tool.  Find a blog that you like, and subscribe to his/her Twitter feed, you will be smarter for it.
4. Screenr.  Screenr is a tool for creating instant screencasts for Twitter.  Although this is a very new tool, it is easy to see the impact this is going to have on people making software demos and screencasts.  Screenr has eliminated the barriers to entry for anyone looking to create demos and screencasts.
   
5. Wikipedia. Originally I was going to list this as Wiki’s in general, but then figured I should probably suggest a specific vendor.  Problem is I don’t know enough about the different Wiki vendors to say which one is the best.  I don’t really think I need to explain this selection, it kinda speaks for itself.
   
6. Articulate Online. Another tool from the great guys at Articulate.  I know listing two products from the same company (or 3 I guess, technically) is a no-no, but this had to make my list.  The reason…Articulate Online has made distributing and tracking eLearning training easy.  One problem with traditional Learning Management Systems is that it is often difficult to deploy content to them, and then distribute content once it is on the LMS.  Articulate Online has changed that with one click publishing and easy deployment links.
7. Moodle.  Yes, Moodle, the Open Source LMS.  Why does this make my list…so many people are using it to distribute and track training.  It is free and reasonably good, which means it works for a lot of people.
   
8. Google Search. I am reading an eBook on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), because it came free with the purchase of my Wordpress theme, and in the book it mentions that 90-98% of Google’s revenue comes from ad-words placed on Google’s site.  So why does that matter?  Well, Google stops making boat loads of cash if people stop using their search, and people will stop using their search if they stop finding what they are looking for.  So cool, now you get the Google business model, but what hell does this have to do with learning and being a good learning tool?  Simple, it allows you to easily and quickly find the information you are looking for.  My dog @winstonpotacho has recently been diagnosed with an elevated lymphocyte count, and the only reason I know what the implications are of a high lymphocyte count is that I was able to find the information by googling for it.  I now know just as much about leukemia in dogs as just about anyone.  In the time before Google I would have no idea what it meant to have an elevated lymphocyte count.  On the positive side of not knowing though, I probably would have slept more than 4 hours a night the last 2 weeks.

Like my list?  Don’t like my list?  Want to submit your own list?  You should let the Center for Learning and Performance technologies know here.

The Articulate Studio ‘09 book published by Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher is finally available.  Highly recomend that you buy it.  Why you might ask?  Fairly certain my name appears in the book at least once.  Patti and Jennifer live close to me and we met up several times this past year to discuss some of the technical details of the book.  Patti and Jennifer were also nice enough to send me a bunch of candy and cookies for helping them out.

You can order the book directly via the publisher and receive a 35% discount with coupon code art0586: Essential Articulate Studio ’09 by Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher (ISBN: 9781598220582).

Congrats again Patti and Jennifer.

Over the past several months I have been ocassionally been lending a technical hand to Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher on the book they are writing on Articulate Studio ‘09.  Well I am excited to announce that the book is now available for pre-order from Amazon here.

Here is the editorial review of the book that sums up pretty much everything that is covered in the book:

Essential Articulate Studio ‘09 is designed to help novice to intermediate users of Articulate Studio ‘09 get the most from using these tools-Presenter, Engage, Quizmaker, and Video Encoder-to develop quality informational and instructional materials. It was written with the following goals in mind: Help new users get up to speed as quickly and painlessly as possible; Assist users of previous versions of Articulate Studio (and previous versions of Presenter, Engage, and Quizmaker) in capitalizing on improvements made to these tools in the ‘09 versions; Provide tips and tools that make information and instruction faster, easier, and better; Help new and previous users develop information and instruction that is more valuable for the intended audience(s) This book is unique because it can serve as both a tutorial for the Studio ‘09 products and as a primer on designing and building good information and instruction with these tools.

If you are a new user to Articulate, or a novice user trying to become more familiar with the product I highly recommend picking it up.

Congrats to Patti and Jennifer on the book, I know they put many, many hours into getting this book written.

Ever had the need or desire to change the hover over or button click sounds in your Quizmaker quizzes?  For example, I was building a quiz on Zombie survival, and I wanted to replace the standard hover over clicks with the sound of a voluture…brought the quiz more to life this way.

Check out my example:
http://www.mozealous.com/projects/hack/quiz.html

Here is how I did it:

1. Published my quiz to web output 
2. Opened the output folder
3. Navigate to the quiz_content subfolder
4. Here you can change the sounds for the following:
   _ButtonClick.mp3 -> When you click a button
   _ButtonHover.mp3 -> When you hover over a button
   _ControlClick.mp3 -> Sound when you drag and drop planks
   _WindowClose.mp3 -> Sound when you close a zoomed window
   _WindowOpen.mp3 -> Sound when you open a zoomed window
5. You need just swap them out with the MP3 of your choice.

As a heads up, Flash doesn’t support all types or bitrates of Mp3’s.  You should be safe if you stick with Mp3s with bitrates of:

16kbps
24
32
40
48
56kbps 
128kbps 

Hear it in action here:

Last Tuesday we released Articulate Studio ‘09 to the world after about 2 years of development, and I am certain once you try it you will find that it was well worth the wait.

It has taken me over a week to blog about this because honestly it takes you, as a QA person, about a week to get your stress level back down from a 10 to a 3 following a release.  We started the beta of Studio ‘09 back in May, and you won’t believe how many hours the entire Articulate team has worked in the last year to get these products out there.

We added some really cool new features to the product that were some of the more popular feature requests over the past several years.  Here are some of those features:

Articulate Presenter ‘09

• Direct FLV support on a slide (no more using my complicated workaround)
• Notes formatting
• A project file for easy project sharing
• A usable Audio Editor
• Improved image conversion
• Improved support for native PowerPoint shapes (basically everything should look better)
• Branching support

Articulate Quizmaker ‘09

• Slide view authoring environment modeled like PowerPoint so that you can make your quiz slides look exactly as you want them to
• A visual timeline to arrange objects and have them appear at certain times
• A free form drawing tool for hotspot questions
• Question grouping and locking (lock questions in place)
• Branching support

Articulate Engage ‘09

• Branching support to link from one step to another
• A color scheme editor to easily edit your color schemes
• Ability to create a summary slide

So those are some of the highlights of the more commonly requested features in the new studio, but that is not all.  We have also released the Articulate Video Encoder as part of Articulate Studio ‘09.  The video encoder allows anyone to easily convert almost any video format to FLV for use in any of their eLearning content.  It also allows you to easily record from your webcam and automatically convert it to FLV format.

I think the thing that shocks people the most when they try out the new Studio ‘09 is what Articulate Quizmaker has become.  Quizmaker was rebuilt from the ground up, and is truely now the easiest to use and most powerful quiz creation tool on the market.  We still offer you the ability to easily and rapidly create great looking quizzes as we have always done, but added the flexibility to customize your quizzes in almost anyway imagineable.  If you have not done so, check out some of the sample content created with the new Quizmaker ‘09:

http://www.articulate.com/products/quizmaker-demos.php

I am certain you will be blown away.

We have also made some big changes to our website (www.articulate.com), and we are still in the process of working on revamping our documentation.  So we still got many great things to come.

Well, I am very stoked that these products are now out there, and now that they are released I should have more time to devote to blogging, so hopefully you will start to see more of me.

Alright, have fun everyone!

I spent a couple of hours the other day looking at, and trying out the instruction in this forum post by Joep on the Articulate Community forums and I must say, it is pretty impressive what he has done.

Joe has created a C# web application that will capture results from Articulate Quizmaker quizzes and store them in a SQL database.

See the original post here:
Quiz to database, instructions and code

Below I have listed some initial impressions.

Positives:

• Probably more reliable than sending results via email (because of technical limitations of browsers and email clients)
• If you have a free Windows Server with IIS the cost is only the time it takes to setup

Drawbacks:

• Requires a Windows Server with IIS
• Pretty technically challenging to setup (not for novice non-IT people)
• Requires modification to the quizmaker.html file after each publish
• Only works in IE (at least it didn’t work for me in Firefox, but if you are using a Windows Server with IIS you probably likely in an environment that requires IE)
• Doesn’t match the feature set you will get from Articulate Online or an LMS

It is pretty cool what Joe has done, and although I would recommend going with a more complete solution such as Articulate Online for capturing quiz results, Joe’s method does provide users with very limited budgets an alternative to emailing quiz results as a method for capturing quiz results.

Good work Joe!

Want a Quizmaker Quiz that will scale to fit in your browser window regardless of the size?

Here is how you can do it:

1. Download the this zip file.
2. Publish your quiz from Quizmaker as you normally would
3. Add the contents of the zip file to your published output (it will replace two files)

This is useful if you want the quiz to scale, so that the browser doesn’t display scroll bars.

Example