• e-Learning authoring and the reuse of content
• Easy and powerful e-learning authoring
• Easygenerator version 8: Create more effective e-Learning
• New translation service for e-Learning courses
• Our plans for the US market.

We hope that you will continue to read this blog on www.easygenerator.com/blogs

We are very happy with this partnership. easygenerator is a social responsible company and partnering with LINGOs gives us the opportunity to do just that using our core competence; facilitating e-Learning development.

But there are more reasons for us to be happy with this partnership. E-Learning development with LINGOs is a very complicated process. LINGOs has e-Learning professionals, all the 65 NGO’s they support have e-Learning developers, but the most challenging part is that there SME’s are literally in the field. They are all over the world working on the projects of the NGO’s. Capturing their knowledge and letting them collaborate with the e-Learning staff of the NGO’s is a challenge. LINGOs wants to partner with easygenerator, because we can facilitate this process through our online model, the workflow and review facilities and the easy of use of easygenerator. LINGOs has respected partners like Outstart and Articulate, yet they see clearly the added value of easygenerator.

For us this is another example that we are on track, we are offering more value than our competitors and that is always pleasant to hear. We will go ‘all out’ for LINGOs. They will get all the facilities a ‘normal’ partner gets from easygenerator: Their own easygenerator deployment, training and support. LINGOs can support all (65) NGOs that are part of their organization. Each NGO will get its own environment. LINGOs  is also allowed to use easygenerator to support other activities like the “Global Giveback Competition” with easygenerator.

All this makes us a proud partner of LINGOs and we are sure that this will be the beginning of a long-lasting and fruitful collaboration.

The easygenerator blog has been moved to easygenerator.com/blogs. Please visit our site for our latest posts.

We will be updating our Youtube channel with new video’s in the future. All new features will get a place in our channel.

An overview of all available video’s.

• Starting easygenerator
• The What-You-see-is-what-you-get editor
• Changing the look and feel of your course
• Using comments
• Assigning tasks
• Review of courses
• Versioning
• Working with templates
• Using Question templates
• Using Question pools
• Editing resources
• Adding Youtube video’s and others
• Integrating of Flash and other interactions
• Publishing a course

We hope you like it. If you want to know more, contact us via info@easygenerator.com and request a live demo or get more information.

The easygenerator blog has been moved to easygenerator.com/blogs. Please visit our site for our latest posts.

And what does this version contain? I will give you some highlights.

Comments
We added the possibility to add comments to pages and to process these comments. When an external review is done (without the use of easygenerator), these comments will be added to the list of comments for that topic.

Task management
Easygenerator now has a very simple but powerful way of managing your tasks. The essence is that you can assign one or more tasks to yourself or somebody else, you can add a due date and a comment. These tasks appear in the task list of the assigned person, sorted on due date. From this list the pages can be started. When you are done with your task you can set the task on processed. It is a very simple tool but very effective.

Version control
Whenever you make a change in a page a new version will be automatically generated and saved. All version are always available through the version list. Versions can be commented on and restored with one simple mouse click. This way you can never lose work ever again. Even if one of your colleagues screwed up one of your great courses, you can restore your version in a second!

More standard master pages
Master pages in easygenerator arrange the functionality of your e-Learning courses and their look and feel. We have added three new master pages to easygenerator for free. Giving authors more standard options. You can adjust these master pages to your liking (both functional and the look and feel). We will add extra master pages for mobile courses within a few weeks time.

Rebranding
easygenerator has a new branding and logo. We have applied this to easygenerator, resulting in a very fresh look and feel of the platform.

Of course we did way more. Bugs were fixed, we made some changes under the hood. For example all data in easygenerator is now stored in XML, making it easier to create more import- en export facilities in the future. We improved performance of the software and installed new servers to ensure an even better user experience.

All in all enough to be proud of. Do you want to see it yourself? Please request a live demo at easygenerator.com. Do you want to explore easygenerator yourself, that is possible to. You can now request a fully functional demo subscription for free for two months and experience what easygenerator is like.

The easygenerator blog has been moved to easygenerator.com/blogs. Please visit our site for our latest posts.

Publishing and updating. Publishing a scorm package to a LMS is often a lot of work. Due to security settings (firewalls, procedures) it often costs a lot of time to publish (or update) the content. The result is that e-Learning content is not regularly updated and the learner has to cope with ‘outdated’ content.

If you need to publish your e-Learning content in more than one look and feel, because you use them for different brands, companies or audiences, the problem increases. The look and feel of a scorm package is set within the package itself; therefore you have multiple packages to publish and update, multiplying the time you spent.

A lot of content is published to different platforms (more than one LMS, mobile, intra- and extranets et cetera). All the content for all these platforms has to be updates separately.

Capturing user feedback. Another issue is that there is no connection between the learner and the author. This means that there is no easy way for the learner to give feedback on the effectiveness of content, additions to the content or remarks about the content to the author.

Tracking and tracing. Tracking and tracing is one of the main reasons why people use scorm. It logs the progress and results of the learner in the LMS.  The problem is that these logs are not always reliable and they are quite limited in their possibilities. Reports with an management overview are often not available.

Dynamic Publication Platform. We have created a solution for these problems with our Dynamic Publication Platform. It addresses both the update and republishing problems as the capture of user input.

Publishing and updating content. We (A New Spring and easygenerator), created a publication server that resides between the authoring system and the learning environment. The author publishes his scorm packages to this platform. A second scorm package is created which contains a link to the content, but not the content itself.

When the learner activates the scorm package in the LMS, it is automatically served from the Dynamic Content Platform.   The learner won’t even notice this.

Whenever the author updates the content on the Dynamic Publication Platform, the learner will automatically get the current version. You don’t have to update the scorm package in the LMS! If the content is used in different Learning Management Systems or in different look and feels, a single update of the Dynamic Publication Platform will automatically update the content of all courses and publications.

Capturing User feedback. Within scorm you have very limited possibilities to capture user feedback. With the Dynamic Publication Platform you can add likes/dislikes to your pages and create the possibility for learners to comment on pages and courses. All the corrections, additions and likes/dislikes are fed back to the author, who can adjust the content based on this input. This functionality can also be used for remarks between learners.

Tracking and tracing. Because our Dynamic Publication Platform is a webserver were you can log and monitor usage and progress in far more detail than you can with your LMS. Not only the individual information regarding a specific learner, but also all kind of management information about groups of learners, courses and other subjects. We have standard reports available, but we can create custom reports. Finally you get more than a fail or pass, you get real management information about the usage and effectiveness of your learning material.

Adaptive learning. Not all your content will be relevant to all your learners. Even on a personal level each learner can develop a different learning need based on their progress and results. The dynamic publication platform makes it possible to add smart technology, which would not be possible within a standard scorm package, to deliver a personalized learning path to each learner. We will go into more detail about this adaptive learning facility in an upcoming blog.

This blog has been written by Martèn de Prez (A New Spring) and Kasper Spiro (easygenerator)

Our goals have changed, we want to be a world player and are now calculating with higher number of (potential) users and we will offer our platform as a software as a service (SAAS). This enables us to lower our prices drastically. A single licence will start from Euro 945 or $ 1.250. This is a yearly fee per named user and it includes licenses, hosting, maintenance, updates and bug fixes.

Each customer will have one workspace. Each author wil have his own folder in this workspace. All folders and courses are accessible for all authors of that customer. Additional workspaces can be bought. Security can be arranged by assigning a number of authors to these extra workspaces. Each workspace will have it’s own file repository. For data storage and data traffic a fair use policy is being used. Functional and didactical support is not a part of the license model and pricing. Easygenerator is sold through a network of partners, they will offer these extra services to you.

Since we expect that our platform will be used more and more for collaborative authoring, it now is also possible to buy a bundle of named user accounts. The greater the bundle, the lower the price per author per year.

As said we aim to service all our customers through our on demand SAAS-service. However there still is a possibility to host the easygenerator platform behind your own firewalls if that is required. An additional license fee will be charged in that case.

If you want more information on our pricing or if you have any other questions, please contact us at info@easygenerator.com or contact one of our partners.

With a new identity comes a new logo and style. Our new logo and slogan are displayed on top of this blog. The slogan I already explained in my  personal blog on the mission of easygenerator.

The logo represents the three main fases of the development process of e-Learning that are supported by easygenerator: Design (orange), Create (pink) and Publish (green). A central point of our platform is collaboration, this is represented by the overlapping parts (the darker areas). We chose for soft shapes and colours. It stresses the fact that we want to support and improve the process of e-Learning development and are not a ‘hard’ it-company.

In January we will launch our new improved and re-branded website.

Dynamic publication. We want to change the way we deliver the content to the end learner, make it more dynamic, more adaptive, easier to maintain and capture user generated content and feed back from the learner.

SME release. We will make our product even easier than it already is. So this phase is all about user interface, terminology, help, best practices, better templates and so on.

Pro release. Additional functionality for the professional e-Learning author. There will be an interface for changing and creating the master pages, a new way to create adaptive learning, extra import facilities, translations facilities et cetera.

Collaborative release. This release will all about working together, creating and maintaining knowledge and courses with professional authors, SME’s and learners.

This is of course a very global overview. In January we will decide on what will be the next release and what will be in it. So now it’s time for your input. If you are not using easyGenerator you can still give us input. We love to give you a free demo account, all we want in return for it is constructive criticism. Tell us and we will take it into account. You can respond to this blog or mail me at K.Spiro@EasyGenerator.com.

First I will go into my background a little. My previous position was Vice President Learning Technology at Stoas Learning in The Netherlands. Stoas is de largest e-Learning company of the Netherlands and represents learning technology solutions like Questionmark Perception , Moodle, Mahara and Exact Learning.  Before that I worked at several other companies as a consultant and manager, always working in the field of e-Learning and EPSS systems. In between I was CEO of locatienet.nl; a Dutch mapping service like Google earth and I worked as an independent consultant for a few years. I have a history in e-Learning and EPSS authoring systems, I have been the founding father of two of them (Seven Steps and Writeplace). You can read my complete bio on Linkedin.

We have big plans with EasyGenerator. We will work from a specific vision on e-Learning and content development. We believe that we are on the verge of great new developments. In the heart of our vision stands that we believe that e-Learning content should be more dynamic:

• Present the learners with accurate and current information instead of rigid Scorm packages. Just enough, just in time; Make content more adaptive to meet the learners needs.
• Make learning a two-way street, not only pushing learning content, but pull knowledge from the learners
• Integrate learning into the day-to-day workplace, bridge the gap between formal and informal learning.

In other words dynamic content will be king. See my personal blog for more detailed information on this vision.

Based on this vision we developed a mission. Our goal is the create the best e-Learning authoring platform in the world and be one of the leading platforms. We believe we can help change e-Learning as we know it and take it to the next level.  And we believe that creating e-Learning must be a collaborative effort of subject matter experts, e-Learning professionals and learners. And above all it must be simple to create and maintain. Our slogan will be: We simplify e-Learning development. You can read my blog on our mission for more details.

So I am all fired up and ready to go. We are finalizing the road map for our product development so there will be more to read soon.

Workflow is a slippery slope. Most people expect a system in which each part of your content can have a status, depending on which different people can perform different tasks with the content, interspersed with a flood of e-mails. In most implementations I have seen this works contra productive and irritating, causing the features to remain unused. EasyGenerator offers the possibility to move or copy (parts of) the content to another Workspace, where (depending the permissions) other users can continue working on it.

Let’s look at another aspect of collaboration, interacting with your client. More specific, facilitating and handling content reviews. Can you recognize the following situation? Your e-Learning course is ready to be reviewed by the client. You publish the product to SCORM, upload it to your LMS, create account(s) for the reviewer(s) and assign them the course.

Your client will now look at your content and, of course, has comments about the used media, text and questions. These comments reach you in the form of a large Word document, filled with print-screens. If you have had more than one reviewer, you soon have a stack of such documents.

The upcoming EasyGenerator 7.2 enhances this process greatly by introducing the 1-2-3  review system:
1. Invite reviewers by just entering their e-mail addresses
2. The reviewers launch the course by a link in the e-mail and can leave comments on each page
3. Their comments appear live in the EasyGenerator editor – in the context of the content!

During the review period, the course developers can continue their work, they can even react on the comments, providing direct feedback to the reviewer(s).

So yes, in our vision, EasyGenerator can be called an LCMS – with alternative and refreshing approaches to solving the industy’s problems.