508 Compliance and Authoring Tools
baldTrainer
Philip Hutchison
Over the past few months, we've noticed a stark increase in the need for 508 compliant courses. I'm curious as to the group's thoughts on the best authoring tools for the creation of this type of content. If you have a few minutes and wouldn't mind sharing, I'd really appreciate it.
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Alex Midence
Hi,
I happen to be someone who is a consumer of said 508 compliant courses. Screen reader user to be exact. Anyway, I’ve seen good output from Adobe Presenter, Camtasia and Lectora. Stay away from Articulate Studio, iSpring and Toolbooks. I’ve heard Captivate and Articulate Story Line put out accessible stuff but don’t have firsthand experience with it. For my own authoring, I use Presenter, Camtasia and the scorm editor found inside an LMS called Ilias. The first two are fully scorm compliant tools right down to granular data reported to the LMS, i.e slide by slide reporting, question, answer and module by module reporting. I’m sure there are other terms for what I’ve said so, please pardon me if I didn’t use them. I hope I got my meaning across anyhow. Ilias puts out outstandingly accessible content, is extraordinarly flexible with the variety of material you can include in your courses but, all you get out of the reporting is whether or not someone passed or failed. I think it’s called status.success or something like that. A real shame.
I hope this helps,
Alex Midence
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Philip Hutchison
Cor
Hi,
I am a developer at the Royal Netherlands Army.
We are “forced” into ILIAS and to use the ILIAS-editor.
Everything created with the ILIAS-editor is not re-useable in another LMS.
I was in Dortmund at a seminar of ILIAS, and they even created a tool so the teachers can edit text in the specific format, because imported Word document get distorted of formatted wrong.
My colleague ask if there is going to be any tracking and tracing within ILIAS.
If we would bring the money, they would…
I thought this is a SCORM 2004 3ed. norm, so it should be in there?
So I agree completely with Alex: A real shame!
The ILIAS community is small.
ILIAS is made by the Medical Fach Hoghschule and they have a coop/partnership with a medical university in Switserland.
Normally I don’t like to react “negative” to comments, but in case someone gets the idea to try ILIAS.
DO NOT GO THERE!!!
I don’t want to offend anyone(!), but I just think it is better to choose an open source and widely spread LMS.
regards
Cor
Ryan Wale
Hey All,
I really appreciate the comments!! Thanks so much!!
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Alex Midence
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Alex Midence
I wanted to add something by way of explanation which was rather awkward to do on my phone:
Ilias has two formats, one that is specific to itself and the other is Scorm. The Ilias learning modules are not reusable unless you export them as Scorm. The modules you create as Scorm are indeed reusable on another LMS. I have used them and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. They are greate for practice exercises and for introducing content. I use other things for creating trackable assessments. Also, I have not had a single problem with using word, powerpoint, excel, png, svg, mp3, wav, avi, mov and flv files inside a scorm package. They work just fine. I use Ilias 4.2.6 if that makes a difference. I use the graphics files as images and the sound files as, well Media that gets embedded into the html page being created. The ms office files are put in as files with a link on the page that refers to them for them to click on and bring up using the application they were created in. This works very nicely for printable versions of how-to’s and so forth. As for question types for helping students review the content they just covered, there are true false, fill in the blank, multiple choice single and multiple answer, matching, interactive image (hotspot) questions, and a couple more that I can’t call immediately to mind at the moment. The learning modules let you add metadata of every imaginable type for those interested in that sort of thing. I could go on and on about all the the nice features of the Ilias Scorm editor. The accordion tabs are fantastic for making a page interactive and for helping learners zoom in on particular topics being covered. Its only Achiles heel is that you can’t get good reporting out of the learning modules. But, if you just want something that will take them through a wide variety of content and don’t mind using other tools for creating assessments, Ilias works like a charm. I wish I could use it as my complete LMS solution instead of only as an authoring environment. The reporting you get in the Ilias-specific (not the scorm) learning modules is quite good. The fact that it also does scorm lets me import content created elsewhere or with other tools. I can even have a course package with both kinds of content in it if I wanted to.
I
Lastly, I will add that I have evaluated other open source LMS tools like Chamilo, Moodle, Sakai and Orlat and, for me, Ilias came out on top since it is easy to use, has very flexible ways of presenting learning content and is very easy to set up and administer
Thanks.
Alex M