Jan – Page 23 – Mylearning.be

Create a SCORM package from a Microsoft LCDS course

I was looking at the stats of my blog, and some of the most visited articles are the ones about Microsoft LCDS. A lot of people are contacting me because they have trouble publishing the LCDS content to a learning management system (e.g. to the SharePoint Learning Kit). Tom Molskov already posted a very useful comment with a procedure on how to do this, but I thought it was time for a little screencast.

This is how I do it:

Open your course in LCDS
Click the Media button in the toolbar to open the Media folder
In the Media window, go one level UP. This brings you in the Courses folder
Select all files (Ctrl+A) and add them to a compressed folder (.zip)
Upload that zip file to your Learning Management System

Classic Office 2003 menus in Office 2007

Recently, my colleage Pierre pointed me to this extension for Office 2007: UBitMenu.

It restores the classic menu structure of Office 2007 on top of the Office 2007 ribbon.

In the meantime, I got used to the ribbon navigation, it really has advantages, but sometimes it would be nice to have the previous menus if you can’t find a certain functionality you don’t use very often. Microsoft also offers the interactive command references to help you out.

The tool is free for personal use.

Why did Yanina not fill in her whereabouts?

I was watching the interview of tennis player Yanina Wickmayer where she explains why she did not fill in her whereabouts in the ADAMS computer system. As a result, she got suspended for one year.

I do not want to take any position about this decision (there are enough Facebook groups that do that), but this story reveals some typical problems that need to be addressed when introducing a new software tool:

Communicate clearly: the “business rules” need to be communicated clearly, so that the user knows the policy and guidelines. For that, you use the proper way of communication with your users (oral, e-mail, …) Sending letters to the home address of a globetrotter does not fall under “proper way of communication”.
Motivate: if your users know the philosophy of your application, why it makes things easier and what the benefits are, chances are much higher that the tool will be accepted.
Make it look nice:while applications are judged by IT people on their functionalities, the end users have a lot of interest for the “look & feel” of the application. If it looks good, your application will “sell better”.
Leverage technology: a web application is a good choice for a global, world wide application, but “a pc connection to the internet” does not seem to be always available to the sporters. But I’m sure they all have a Blackberry. Why not make a mobile app?
Train and document: the ADAMS application is a great example where the use of e-learning would be very appropriate: lot’s of users, spread over the entire world. Short demos, faqs, procedures…

WADA, Vlaamse Overheid, if you need any help, let me know. I see it as my contribution to Belgian top tennis.

The ribbon in SharePoint 2010

As you have probably heard, SharePoint 2010 has a total new interface on the user side: it has the ribbon as we know it from Office 2007.

There are a couple of reasons why this can probably become an issue and will require extra training for your end users:

a lot of companies are still running Office 2003, and will probably hold on upgrading until Office 2010 is available. These people have never seen the ribbon before!
the ribbon is “security trimmed”, but where in MOSS 2007 any option that you did not have access to was hidden, it is grayed out in SP 2010. This gives some very strange results if you only have read access: you get a ribbon full of disabled buttons.
Some functions are less accessible than befor, e.g. the content types. It requires some extra clicks to get where you want.

Definitely something to consider when you start planning your end user training!

Tips and best practices for screencasts

The people from TechSmith (Camtasia, Jing, Snagit…) recently polled their community for best practices and tips for creating effective screencasts, software animations, screen demo’s, whatever you want to call them.
They bundled the result in a 3-page booklet, in a kind of “tag cloud” format. Quick to read, and very valuable!

You can download it from their blog.