Tools to Convert Assets

To decide which tools to use when, start at a common beginning: judge your training objectives, including what degree of performance you're looking for and how you'll evaluate achievement. Always select a delivery technique that will allow you to evaluate the achievement of the objectives. If you cannot evaluate performance with a particular delivery technique, then it's the wrong one for you.

Video
The easiest way to convert lectures is to videotape the trainer, digitize and compress the film, and post the clip onto a streaming-media server. This method is suited to very simple learning needs.

Audio
Audio has some advantages over full video. High-quality audio files are smaller and need less bandwidth than even poor-quality video. try out with various settings to produce a file that  the trainee can download and play easily. Inserting the sound into a multimedia program, like Macromedia Flash, will take care of the compression

Slides
Slide presentations have been the support of most training classes. Before altering classroom slide presentations for use in an online lesson, assess the complexity of slides, such as animation, transition, sounds, and other special effects. If you’re using PowerPoint slides, the simplest solution is to use the Save as HTML command. This selection creates a linked series of Web pages analogous to the slides and lets developers target certain browsers. You may want to add features. For example, to include voice narration, use the Record Narration command.

Handouts
Courses normally use handouts, textbooks, and assign library readings. All reading can be converted to electronic form. Adobe Acrobat PDF permits users to distribute copies of any document that can be printed. Creating PDF documents necessitate Acrobat publishing software, and trainee must have the free Acrobat Reader program. Acrobat documents can be simple imitations of their paper equivalent, or you can add hypertext links, thumbnail images of pages, sounds, and other multimedia.

Interaction This includes Tests. Macromedia Authorware and CourseBuilder for Macromedia Dreamweaver offer regular test templates, including true-or-false, multiple choice, drag-and-drop, and text entry.

Practice exercises. Many courses include laboratory sessions or other practical activities. Remember that online versions need to exercise the decision-making processes rather than imitate the classroom activity. This kind of activity needs no technology other than plain HTML and a Web browser.

Simulated tasks. Sometimes it's too complex or expensive to have trainee interact with the actual system. Essentially, a fundamental simulator is a linked series of image maps of the various dialog boxes. Correctly performing a step, such as clicking on a tab or button, displays the next panel or dialog box in the procedure. Simulation uses Dynamic HTML and JavaScript programming. Tools as Macromedia Director, Authorware, and Flash help developers to build excellent interaction by automatic scripting.

Discussion forums. The majority of Internet server packages include a component to sustain discussion groups, and similar software is often included in browsers or email readers.

Conclusion

New software programs have made life much easier for developers and facilitators of e learning! Interactive exercises, testing, collaboration, and content development are significantly simplified. What used to take days/weeks can now be done more quickly - with modest or no coding/programming skills required.