Reviews ASTD Members Only
Lectora Publisher for Enterprise LMS
By Hank Stanley
Lectora Publisher is a content rendering system that creates courses in Web-ready DHTML, CD-ROM, and DVD formats. Patterned after the divisions within a book, Publisher enables developers to lay out their courses in three levels of detail: title, chapter, and sections of individual pages. Depending upon the complexity of the subject, books may contain only pages or any number and combination of chapters and sections.
The Lectora CD set contains a template gallery with 60 backdrops, pre-fabricated with sharp color schemes and four common navigation buttons: Back, Next, Home, and Help. To populate certain combinations of course pages selectively, Lectora uses a feature called "Inheritance." The function applies the same object , such as a company logo, automatically onto all pages within a designated section, within a specific chapter, or on pages that haven't been preconfigured to prevent such application. With a little prior planning, the Inheritance feature can reduce the time it takes to lay out multiple pages.
Practicing their preaching
Prior planning seems to be a Lectora strong suit. The user guide contains an excellent discussion of the workflow involved in creating courses, including a 25-step sequential checklist on analysis, design, and development preliminaries. The checklist is repeated in the online Help narratives--couched in learning objective statements.
Creating media, obtaining clip art, and publishing output options are also addressed. If there's an object format or media type that can't be used in Lectora, it wasn't evident. Lectora even handles IPIX 3-D images.
Developers have full leeway for creating progress tests in any combination of true-false, multiple-choice, essay, and short answer questions. Tests can be timed and have per-question feedback. They also can be randomized from a master question bank and may be graded automatically. Collaborative development is accomplished internally by using the Import function from an Existing Title feature, which combines various Lectora frameworks into a single, pre-designated master project controlled by the team leader.
Project participants will find that Lectora actually has three modes of operation. As with most tools, there's a build mode (Edit) and an operate mode (Run). The Run mode plays selected portions of the course sequence within the Lectora workspace. A third mode, Preview, runs the course in a full-screen display exactly as a student would see it.
Action and objects
Lectora uses all the standard interactive bells and whistles, including mouse-over pop-ups, object visibility toggling, dissolves, fades, executables, variables for branching, and more. There are also assistant functions that Lectora calls automated tools, such as wizards for buttons and titles, spell checking, and table of contents creation. A post-delivery function for error checking jumps to the offending page if any problem is discovered.
Lectora Publisher claims to be SCORM compliant, and it proudly sports the Good Housekeeping seal in the form of the AICC logo, which means the software has been independently tested by the aviation industry's CMI standardization body. And, when I dashed off an email to the Lectora technical support department asking a how-to question, they replied within a couple of days and included a .ZIP file with three different options for addressing the problem, any of which could have been imported as a fully functioning object within Publisher.
Recommendation
Recommendation? Let me count the ways. The people at Trivantis have thought of everything. Lectora Publisher is simple to use with competently presented functionality. It has innovative features, such as its Inheritance feature. The technical support seems to go above and beyond; the documentation is absolutely superb; and the product is AICC certified.
Lectora Publisher for Palm OS
Try not to groan, but Publisher for Palm OS is Lectora's Mini Me--identical but diminutive. The functionality of the user interface is the equal of Lectora Publisher, but the image in the work area is smaller, Palm-sized, as you might expect.
At a monitor resolution of 1024 x 768 with a fully maximized screen, the largest page display (of two available) is the equivalent of a business card turned on end, just over 2 inches wide by 3.5 inches tall. If you reduce the resolution to 800 x 600, the slightly larger page display may enable you to put away the clockmaker's spectacles. There's no zoom feature available for the page, most likely because the guts of the software is the same as for the normal-sized tool, which has no need to zoom. Zooming capability should be high on the Trivantis to-do list in a future version for Palm OS.
What you see is what you get
In all fairness, I should point out that my myopic perspective of the pages in Palm OS might not be as pronounced to the average user. This was one of the last tools I tested, and up to that point, I had been working on large screens with plenty of space for placing and manipulating content.
Other than the micro pages, the product is as useful as the full-sized version. The software loads on a Windows machine and will produce courseware in PRC format for PDAs using the Palm 3.5, or newer, operating system (including Sony, Samsung, Handspring, Kyocera, and others). This version has the Inheritance feature to apply repetitious content to selected pages or chapters.
The tri-level modes (Build, Run, and Preview) are available, and the course titles are laid out in a familiar Chapter-Page tree in the left pane of the interface. Project preplanning is again addressed in the Help narrative because the Title Wizard, at the outset, requires developers to declare the number of chapters and pages their courses will contain. The wizard also requires developers to choose the page layout at the beginning, either the square Palm-sized page (ultimately 2.24" x 2.24") or a longer scrollable page.
Limited Output
The only distribution option available in Palm OS is for file outputs to Palm-compatible devices. Distribution creates a single compressed Windows installation file that loads all course data files onto the PDA from a desktop unit during a synchronization process. If a course requires that the results from a test or survey be submitted for recording, the LectoraConduit.dll is used. This is a data transfer function (selectable as one of the test page properties) that allows learners to submit results directly from the course by email or through a CGI program.
There doesn't seem to be a limitation on the number of animations or graphics that developers can use, but bells, whistles, and eye-ticklers take a toll on the limited RAM onboard most PDAs. Although Trivantis is working on a system upgrade that will allow courseware to take advantage of the expandable memory cards (up to 32 MB for Palm), as of now, that feature isn't available.
Recommendation
I have my doubts about the level of demand for mini courses delivered via handhelds. How many users are out there who can't just stop by the nearest desktop PC? The folks at Trivantis must have peered into the future and spied an approaching market for such training, though. And that may be why the price tag is so low, for now. Other than the current PDA memory limitation, everything else is just as effective as the full Lectora tool.