[event] Lectora User Conference

A few months ago, I did not know anything about Cincinnati, let alone how to spell it. (Double N, single T as it turns out.) Now that I'm here for the Lectora User Conference 2011, it turns out this city has a lot more history than I was aware of. My hotel for example is one of the most beautiful art deco buildings I've ever seen. Home town of 5 presidents, it used to be one of the first important mainland cities, and it is the headquarters of giants like Proctor & Gamble. At this day, it became more or less a conference town.... Anyway, that is enough trivia. I'm here to speak at the conference, my talk is later today.

I'm going to speak about the IBM Cloud Author, which is our own installation of Lectora Online. We started to use this tool (disclaimer: we use many other authoring tools as well, that is a project by project decision in agreement with our clients) for our professional e-learning development teams to step up in the game. Over the past, we have industrialised content production, and split it into a local front end and a global resources back end to control costs. Now the next step is to move to the cloud in an online authoring environment and make use of collaborative features to get content development productivity to the next level. Online authoring tools change the game (online review notes, working in parallel with check in/out features per page, allowing multiple roles access so the content engineer is no bottleneck, shared media library, templates, etc.) . During my talk I'm going over possibilities that online authoring tools offer. In my view, desktop tools have become as good as they are going to get and productivity won't increase much. The game changes by taking the tool online, opening it up as a shared working table for the whole dispersed development team, and unlocking collaboration features in the technology and processes around it.

But moving to an online authoring tool turned out not only beneficial for professional e-learning makers, but also for 'the rest of us'. We now have 'partly-assembled' courses available for consultants. These 'partly assembled courses' are much more than templates: they are fully functional titles, with navigation and dummy content that is about 80% suitable for general use. The tool has a low learning curve, so now our SAP consultants for example can take a template 'SAP Navigation Basics', which is a fully functional course, and change 20% of the text, include a few extra pages, their client's logo, change the screenshots et voila... new custom course made by the Subject Matter Expert. It also allows the 'social' side a tiny bit: this tool allows anyone now to create 'better than powerpoint' learning interventions they want to create on a topic that matches their expertise, and share it out. While this 'second audience' was not the intended one when we first moved to this online authoring platform, it is one with great potential that could in the long run mean more...

The big announcement at the opening of the conference:
-Trivantis will buy Flypaper, a tool they had already included in their suite.
- New tool : Snap! Trivantis announced a new tool Snap by lectora. It is an entry level tool for rapid and easy learning creation. And for 99$ this could become the easy and cheap tool that could resonate in an e-learning market where there is no decent free or open source tool available for decent e-learning creation. I'm going to get a free copy as everyone in this conference, so I'll be sure to do a small and unbiased review on it.

I'll keep you posted on my conference experience : Elliott Masie will share his view on the learning future, I'll have my talk lined up later this afternoon, and much more.... Stay tuned!