We have produced a site for Power Hydraulics who are a hydraulics contractor working in the Adelaide Hills and the northern suburbs of Adelaide.
They are an owner operator business with solid ethics of honest reliable service. They offer a 24/7 breakdown service and work with many industrial businesses to the north of Adelaide.
We have just completed a simple site for the Stainless Boatworks. This business produces marine stainless steel fabrication work for most of the boating industry in South Australia. Ron Jesche is a shipwright with many years experience in the industry.
Although it was a simple site the main brief was to display a good collection of photos showing examples of Stainless Boatworks marine stainless steel fabrications. These can be seen by going to the site and clicking on photos.
We have just completed a rebuild of the aboto.com.au web site which now includes online courses.
Apart from a facelift the new Aboto site has an online payment facility in order to allow users to access their online training courses.
Currently there are two online courses that can be purchased:
From a development perspective this site is built with WordPress and Woocommerce installed with two extra Woocommerce plugins one to provide pdf invoices and one to enable the gateway to eWay.
The gateway experience was really interesting in that we planned to use both PayPal and eWay to provide credit card payments. The identification authentication now required by the Australian Government mean that it is not as simple as it once was to set up a new account. The client with our assistance found eWay support immensely more helpful in working through these issues. The eWay account was up and running about a fortnight before the PayPal issues were resolved and the payment flow is simpler and cleaner with the eWay gateway.
It is also worth noting that previously eWay only had payment plans that include an annual fee. This was problematic for clients where initially their online sales were small but with the prospect of building them over time. Now there is an eWay plan that has no ongoing fees and there is just a fee per transaction. This is great for clients where they are just starting out with online sales.
In this case the courses themselves were developed by others and not part of our project.
We are an Articulate Storyline Developer and over the last few weeks we have been discussing a number of eLearning projects with various clients.
This has led to discussion about why we use Articulate Storyline in many of our projects so I thought I’d share a small part of those discussions.
Storyline is a great platform with which to create feature rich courses that can leverage the best in eLearning, but this post is more about the advantages of separating course content from learning management system (LMS).
If we create a course in Storyline it can be a separate entity in itself. It can be picked up and used in a different LMS. If needed it can be used as a stand alone course.
The comparison is the situation where many eLearning developers build the course as an integral part of their LMS.
In some cases our clients will already have an LMS and they just want a particular drop in course. Storyline is great for this.
As a client if you get your course built in an eLearning provider’s system you are locked in and do not have the option of picking up your courses and taking them somewhere else.
However, there can be downsides to this model.
The big drawback is many LMS’s can only handle a course that gives a SCORM output. This governs the communication between the course and the LMS. With SCORM the course can only pass a pass/fail or complete/incomplete. If you want to pass across details like which questions were answered correctly SCORM will not allow this.
There is a new standard that is slowly replacing SCORM called TINCAN (xAPI) which will allow a full amount of information to be passed to a Learning Record Store (LRS). This LRS can be part of the LMS or as a separate entity. But for some clients this is not the solution for today even though it holds good promise for the future.
So the drawback of the separate Storyline course / LMS model is that if your LMS can only handle SCORM you only get a limited amount of course completion information returned to your LMS, but in many circumstances this is not a problem and then advantages of separating course content from LMS are significant.
We have just finished a new web site for Victor Harbor artist Chris Reid called Wild and Woody.
Chris is a local Victor Harbor wood carver producing a range of carved bowls, platters mirror frames, sculptures and utensils.
A big part of our job was to work with Chris to get a result that he felt really reflected his ideas as well as training him in editing his content and the online shop. The shop is relatively simple with payment made either by bank transfer or credit card through PayPal.
Finding a solution that the client is comfortable with is an important part of our job and in many cases the line ‘simple is best’ is what works best.
Have a look at some of his great work www.wildandwoody.com.au
We have just completed some projects for Western Australian Country Health Service.
They supplied PowerPoint slide shows of their projects including artwork and we converted them into Articulate Storyline projects. The completed projects included animation and quizzes with feedback. These projects will be loaded into their SCORM compliant LMS and it will enable effective online learning for their staff. The PowerPoint to Storyline workflow enabled the work to be done quickly and made it easy to transfer the project requirements to us.
Do you have a PowerPoint project that could readily be converted into effective online training? If so contact us for a quote or further information on this service.