Lectora a Complete elearning Solution Irina Ioniţă 1, Liviu Ioniţă 1 (1) University Petroleum-Gas of Ploiesti, Department of Information Technology, Mathematics, Physics, Bd. Bucuresti, No.39, 100680, ROMANIA E-mail: tirinelle@yahoo.com, lionita@gmail.com Abstract As a teacher you have to prepare your courses in an attractive, understandable and convenient way to make sure that information is transmitted in adequate form and substantial content to the students. E-learning experts develop new learning technologies and various software solutions to gain more users in this field. Lectora e-learning software provides a complete end-to-end e-learning solution both for corporate learning departments and professional e-learning companies. Using Lectora to build rapidly e-learning courses without any programming language is a substantial advantage. In this paper the authors present an example of Lectora usage highlighting its benefits equally for teaching staff and students. Keywords: Lectora, elearning solution, content learning 1. Introduction Information Society or Information Age is a well-known term used at the present. Internet technology explosion and global information infrastructure development, as well as constant changes in humans behavior regarding the concern for discovering new learning solution are providing necessary background for experts in this field. Despite many technological advances and the integration of new pedagogical concepts and models, the majority of today s education organizations continue to utilize the traditional learning methods. The education area is now an adequate place where various technologies meet to respond on global challenges of forming successful people. Education and training organization should focus their activities on creating knowledge to use it for teaching next generation of students. Virtual classroom, chats, forums are few popular examples of new realization in the education field. These products demand an appropriate curricula and teaching technologies in order to take into account the students needs. Lectora e-learning software provides a complete end-to-end e-learning solution both for corporate learning departments and professional e-learning companies. Using Lectora to build e- learning courses without any programming language as background is a substantial advantage. In this paper the authors present an example of Lectora usage highlighting its benefits equally for teaching staff and students. 2. E-Learning solutions All forms of electronically supported learning and teaching define the e-learning concept. E- learning applications include Web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual education/ virtual environment, digital collaboration etc. The learning content is delivered via the Internet of other electronic support (audio or video), including media tools in the form of text, image, animation etc.
396 University of Bucharest and "Babeş-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca Creating the e-learning content is not simple, because the units of educational material must correspond to the curricula and must follow the establish guidelines. The consistency of pedagogical approaches needs to be evaluated in order to find the adequate template to efficiently create educational materials. As a teacher you want to quickly and easily build your courses that your students access them using various devices (desktops, laptops etc.). Most of the online learning frameworks combine user-defined content and behaviors with animation, flexible testing and certificates (Flex Training, 2011, 1educat.ro, 2011). Lectora Inspire represents a complete elearning solution for education and training organizations with build-in resources for rapid elearning development (templates, wizards etc.). In the following section the authors present an example of course build with Lectora software, the trial version (Trivantis, 2011). 3. Building a Lectora application Before you start using Lectora to build your own application you have to follow several steps such as: establishing the course to be translated into electronic format and guide studying; splitting topics in the units and setting a course template (specific competencies and objectives are established for each unit of learning); establishing the learning content and the tasks for each units; establishing the evaluation form and the review process for course publication of the elearning platform; publishing the course. Lectora supports all universal multimedia formats and can convert and compress audio and video to Flash format. Lectora Inspire includes Camtasia for Lectora, SnagIt for Lectora and Flypaper for Lectora to easily develop screen recordings, screen captures, videos, and engaging Flash (Trivantis, 2011). A menu builder helps users to easily design interactive navigation buttons. The learning content is organized into Chapters, Sections and Pages. Lectora offers a template gallery with helpful descriptions for each template. A benefit of Lectora is that engages students by instantly displaying question feedback after each question is answered, but before the answer is submitted. When the user accesses Lectora a friendly window appears and the user have to choose the way he want to define and build the application (creating a new title or opening an existing title) (fig.1). In the following example the authors create a new title. The course chosen to be translated into electronic format refers to operating systems and is addressed to the students from Mathematics, the Letters and Science Faculty (fig. 2). The next step is to split topics in the units and to choose the adequate template for course building. The course objectives are well defined and the competencies for each unit should be established. In this example the learning content is organized in nine learning units. As a result of defining the all learning units, Lectora builds a hierarchical structure where the user can access each unit to modify or to add new properties using the Title Explorer window (fig. 2). The operation of defining objectives, tasks, competencies, proprieties is repeated for all units using the existing hardcopy version of the course. The resulted pages of the each unit contain the most important topics reflecting the main objectives. The next step is to publish the course on different format such as: single file executable, CD- ROM, HTML, CourseMill (CourseMill Learning Management System offers the most affordable and easy solution for managing online training.the Lectora server) etc. (fig. 5).
The 6 th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2011 397 Fig.1. Getting started with Lectora Fig. 2. The Title Explorer window Fig. 5. The publishing options The publishing job refers also to the process of verifying the errors resulted after the design process. In the current example the option for publishing was the single file executable. Fig.6. The results of course publishing
398 University of Bucharest and "Babeş-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca The executable file can be run on the computer without any connection to the elearning server. The graphical user interface is presented in the figure 7. The learning content consist in nine units, named curs01, curs02,, curs09 and an evaluation unit named test grila. Fig. 7. The welcome window An example of learning unit is presented in the figure 8. The entire learning content for this unit can be accessed using a hyperlink. Fig. 8. An example of learning unit
The 6 th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL 2011 399 Lectora offers a variety of testing options such as automated grading, weighted questions, timed testing and randomized test questions for the knowledge check. The question type can be: true/false, multiple choices, short answer, essay, fill in the blank, matching, drag and drop, hot spot. The authors used the true/false questions in the current example (fig.9). Fig. 9. The knowledge check Some significant features of Lectora regarding the knowledge check are: resetting questions (automatically reset individual questions on a page and repeating the question until it is given the correctly answer), printing test results, customizable questions and tests etc. A certificate tool rewards users for a job well done by quickly creating certificates for test or course completions. Using certificate templates the teacher can easily customize with desired colors and fonts as well as specified names and dates for the students. As a conclusion, Lectora represents an elearning solution to develop professional elearning courses and presentations and can be used by academic institution, government agencies etc. References Books: Lectora Inspire, Trivantis High Definition elearning, Trivantis Corporation (2010): Lectora User Guide, http://www.trivantis.com/downloads/lectora_user_guide.pdf Internet Sources: http://www.flextraining.com/ http://www.trivantis.com/ http://www.1educat.ro/elearning/solution/solutii_elearning.html http://www.transition.co.uk/media/51513/lectora%20data%20sheet.pdf Computer Programs: Trivantis Corporation Inc., United Kingdom (2010): Lectora Inspire [Windows, version 4.1].