Bottom-Line Performance

What is “Outstart’s ForceTen?”

Outstart is a company who bought out Eedo the company who originally owned ForceTen which is an LCMS (Learning Content Management System) authoring tool. Got it?

We have been using ForceTen for a little over a year now for a client, and have gone through some “ForceTen growing pains” and thought you out there might be interested in what we’ve learned and embraced during our ForceTen experience thus far.

First, let’s get it out in the open now, ForceTen is not Flash and the “force” is not at all involved. The truth is, ForceTen was not built with multimedia developers (those who are proficient in Flash, HTML, Lectora, etc.) in mind. ForceTen is built for the business content developer who needs to deliver lots of content quickly to a lot of people. It allows you to store documents, images, charts, or anything else you would want to put in a course, in one central searchable repository. The metadata functionality is a huge plus for developers who share content (why create things twice?) and for updating content - because content is always changing!

So, what are the challenges? How did we overcome them? Read on to learn about some of the challenges we faced and how we overcame them…

One challenge, regardless of the tool, is how to organize the information on the screen. For this course on facilitation skills, we wanted to explain the differences in facilitating a course in several different countries. At first, we thought a table would be the best way. But after laying everything out on screen, that was way toooooo much text. Instead, we decided to create a graphic that highlights the different countries; using the graphic, the learners can rollover one or more of the countries to learn some facilitating tips for that area. The lesson here = graphics still play a large part in what you develop and ForceTen allows you to store and reuse common graphics.

Another particularly large challenge for the same course was the use of multiple videos. One issue we faced was the file size: they had to be small enough to fit the 20 MB limit of ForceTen. The larger (and unexpected limitation) was the video player. We wanted the video to play on click, but the ForceTen player auto-starts when you reach a screen. The custom player we traditionally use couldn’t be uploaded into the course. Then, when it was finally in the course, it interacted and broke our navigation. Eventually, we gave up the custom player and went with a much simpler solution. A black screen counting down to the start of the video. Not a perfect solution, but it did give learners some time to read the onscreen text before the video began to play. The lesson here = we can still add video (and a lot of the other “flashy” stuff we currently use), but have to think of creative workarounds to get the same desired effect.

Using ForceTen as a development tool has certainly challenged our processes and how we develop courses, but it has allowed us to explore creative ways to present content and still get the same learner outcome. And really, I could say that about any new tool we try! Each tool in a developer’s tool box has its strengths and weaknesses, the key is to now how to play up the strengths, use the right combination of tools, and always keep the end goal in mind…the learner’s experience!

Tags: content development, Eedo, ForceTen, LCMS, Outstart

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 4:52 pm and is filed under LMS/LCMS, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.