Characters for eLearning

I am working on an eLearning project where I will be using a character that will be the learners tutor throughout the module. I am toying with the idea of creating a cartoonish character and in my research I came across SP Studio which is a very cool site that makes it easy to create custom south park cartoon characters. That's me as a South Park character by the way, yes I am addicted to my Blackberry. I won't be able to use the South Park characters for my eLearning project because there is not enough flexiblity to move the arms around but I will definitely keep this in mind for future projects. It's a great way to add a little fun to an eLearning course.

At this point I am leaning towards using vector clip art to create the character. Although it can be rather time consuming to edit the points of the vector to get it just the way you want it but it's quicker than drawing the images in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Flash, at least for me it is. Tom Kuhlmans post on the Rapid eLearning Blog inspired me to go the vector route.

The other option I am considering is going away from the cartoonish look and taking photos of an employee of the company. I have done this in the past and it was nice to have the flexiblity of asking the person to pose any way you wish rather than struggling with editing points in vector images.

The plan from here is to play around a little more with vector images and if that ends up not working out I will go the route of taking pictures. Unless of course myself or somebody else out there comes up with a much better idea...

Captivate and Moodle play well with others

I finished up my first project developed with Captivate and decided to take the opportunity to dive into SCORM with Moodle. Until now, I have only experimented with moodle and have never had to worry about SCORM when publishing courses. We are now taking our eLearning programs to a larger scale and Moodle will sure save us a lot of headaches as opposed to using MS Sharepoint as we have been doing. So, I decided to take the leap and try and figure out what this whole SCORM thing was about.

At first I had a hard time finding specific instructions of how to make a SCORM class work in Moodle. Forgive my ignorance but I had no idea that you were supposed to upload the entire zipped package intact. I think this is beneath the regulars in the Moodle forums which is why I had a tough time finding anything on it.

Once I figured that out everything went surprisingly well. The scores from assesments within the Captivate eLearning module were recorded in the Moodle gradebook flawlessly. Now that I have this hurdle out of the way I am ready to dive into Moodle and make it my companies full time eLearning university. This comes in perfect timing for the eLearning courses I am working on for a management training program. I am just about ready to run a pilot test of the courses so I will also be able to use this opportunity for a pilot run of Moodle.