Microsoft LCDS

 

For educators: LCDS Author (Learning Content Development System) is a free software from Microsoft that lets you create and publish e-learning courses.

You can include software simulations, interactive Flash content (such as Drag and Drop, tile puzzle game, etc.) and the regular true-false / multiple choice style questions in your e-learning content.

Once you are done authoring the course, it can pre-viewed in the web browser and you may then publish it as a SCORM 1.2 Package for hosting in any Learning Management System (LMS).

A strong limitation of Microsoft LCDS

have been playing quite some time now with Microsoft’s Learning Content Development System. I promised in an earlier post to put some content online, but that is where it went wrong. I just could not get the content published in any other LMS than the SharePoint Learning Kit.  After some testing, it seems that the content needs to be hosted on… a Microsoft IIS server. 

For me, these are some serious limitations to LCDS as an authoring tool.

Adding a new language to Microsoft LCDS

Someone asked me if it would be possible to add a new language to the available language packs of the Microsoft Learning Content Development System. Well, as the system supports already multiple languages, that should not be that difficult. This is what I did (use at your own risk!):

 

• Navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Learning\LCDSc\application\viewer. This folder contains a subfolder, one for every available language.
• Copy the folder that corresponds most to the language you want to create. Or if no correspondence, copy any folder and give it a three letter language code.
• Inside your new folder, go to the folder named shared. Inside that folder, there is a folder with the same language code, rename that to your new code.
• Inside that folder, there is a file version.xml. Edit the file in Notepad and make the necessary changes.
• Open the viewer folder inside that folder.
• The file viewerstrings.js contains the different language strings for the viewer. Edit the file in Notepad and translate.
• The Help and appart folder contain the help screens. Translate these if necessary.
• Go back to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Learning\LCDSc\application and edit the supportedLanguages.xml file with notepad. Copy one of the lines to add a new line for your language.

Done! The new language should appear when creating a new course!

 

Testing Microsoft LCDS

OK, I found some time tonight to give the new Microsoft Learning Content Development System a try. I created a small sample course, using the LCDS, Captivate, and Paint.Net.
Some findings:

• The structure of Module – Lesson – Topic is very rigid. This is good for having a consistent structure in your course, but for small modules it is sometimes overkill, resulting in some blank pages, or pages-where-you-need-to-invent-some-content-because-the-page-is-there-anyway.
• The templates are very easy to use. Integration of .swf works well.
• Sometimes I would like to tweak some html-code, but there does not seem to be a way via the UI. Embedding a Youtube video for example would be nice.
• After moving around some navigation items, I had a corrupt topic, it kept messing up the navigation. Deleting the topic resolved the issue.
• The color scheme of tables (beige) is not very nice; could probably be fixed by modifying the stylesheet that is used.
• The testing/question templates are quite nice. Multiple choice, true-false, even some drag&drops.

I tried importing the package in a WSS site with the SharePoint Learning Kit: worked like a charm! No errors, navigation is nicely taken over by the Learning Kit viewer. This might become a very powerful combination for organisations looking for low cost content creation and distribution! Have a look at the screencast.