Mylearning.be

I have been playing quite some time now with Microsoft’s Learning Content Development System. I promised in an earlier post to put some content online, but that is where it went wrong. I just could not get the content published in any other LMS than the SharePoint Learning Kit. 

After some testing, it seems that the content needs to be hosted on… a Microsoft IIS server. All my test systems were running Apache, PHP and MySQL (as most open source lms systems do). 

As I do not have a publicly accessible SharePoint with SLK, I made the content available on a simple team site. You can access the content via this link. Make sure that your popup blocker is turned of. Unfortunately, this does not work on a Mac, you need IE6 or IE7 to view it. 

For me, these are some serious limitations to LCDS as an authoring tool.

Someone asked me if it would be possible to add a new language to the available language packs of the Microsoft Learning Content Development System. Well, as the system supports already multiple languages, that should not be that difficult. This is what I did (use at your own risk!):

• Navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Learning\LCDSc\application\viewer. This folder contains a subfolder, one for every available language.
• Copy the folder that corresponds most to the language you want to create. Or if no correspondence, copy any folder and give it a three letter language code.
• Inside your new folder, go to the folder named shared. Inside that folder, there is a folder with the same language code, rename that to your new code.
• Inside that folder, there is a file version.xml. Edit the file in Notepad and make the necessary changes.
• Open the viewer folder inside that folder.
• The file viewerstrings.js contains the different language strings for the viewer. Edit the file in Notepad and translate.
• The Help and appart folder contain the help screens. Translate these if necessary.
• Go back to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Learning\LCDSc\application and edit the supportedLanguages.xml file with notepad. Copy one of the lines to add a new line for your language.

Done! The new language should appear when creating a new course!

OK, I found some time tonight to give the new Microsoft Learning Content Development System a try. I created a small sample course, using the LCDS, Captivate, and Paint.Net.

Some findings:

• The structure of Module – Lesson – Topic is very rigid. This is good for having a consistent structure in your course, but for small modules it is sometimes overkill, resulting in some blank pages, or pages-where-you-need-to-invent-some-content-because-the-page-is-there-anyway.
• The templates are very easy to use. Integration of .swf works well.
• Sometimes I would like to tweak some html-code, but there does not seem to be a way via the UI. Embedding a Youtube video for example would be nice.
• After moving around some navigation items, I had a corrupt topic, it kept messing up the navigation. Deleting the topic resolved the issue.
• The color scheme of tables (beige) is not very nice; could probably be fixed by modifying the stylesheet that is used.
• The testing/question templates are quite nice. Multiple choice, true-false, even some drag&drops.

I tried importing the package in a WSS site with the SharePoint Learning Kit: worked like a charm! No errors, navigation is nicely taken over by the Learning Kit viewer. This might become a very powerful combination for organisations looking for low cost content creation and distribution! Have a look at the screencast.

I’ll try to put my content online somewhere so that you can have a look at it.