Speaker 1: Developing, creating, and delivering online training courses is a big responsibility and it can be a challenge to make sure that those courses are effective and interesting for whatever audience that we want to help, whether it's students in grade school, higher education, corporate training, any audience that needs to learn something new. Well, in this video, we're going to take a look at how we can create online courses that have simulations in them, assessments and quizzes in them, all sorts of different ways to engage the audience and to extract the most value from the time that they spend online. Because we're not going to be there with them while they're taking the online course. So we need to make sure that that online course has all of the elements that are required for them to really understand the topic that we're trying to teach so that they can then bring that into a classroom, in the case of a flipped classroom, or into the workplace in the case of corporate or workplace training, or into their life in the case of an audience where I want to show them how to do something that they couldn't do before. We not only need to be able to create that content for the audience, but we also need to be able to create it quickly for just-in-time training. We need to be able to create it effectively using tools that we understand. As you probably guessed, I'm going to show you in this video how to really make your Training Elite and I'm going to use a tool called iSpring Suite. They're sponsoring this video but I have been using them for more than a year and I found them to be a very useful tool. So let's take a look at the iSpring Suite and why I'm such a big fan of using it to create the online learning content. This is part of a series of videos where I'm going to show you different aspects of using the iSpring Suite in order to make more effective online training. So this is video number one. I'll link to the other videos in the description below and let's take a look at iSpring Suite today. Now, just before we take a look at the iSpring Suite and how it's a fantastic tool for creating that compelling and interesting online training content, let's look at a tool we're familiar with, Microsoft PowerPoint, which is a tool that we can use for in-person training and we often do. And why do we use Microsoft PowerPoint? Because it can provide a structured, organized approach to delivering training content. But it has some limitations that are fairly significant, and that is specifically that it doesn't allow for self-directed navigation through the environment in a way that's compelling and interesting and does a great job of teaching and training. We can export a PowerPoint to a movie, or we can export it so that somebody can navigate through the slides, but that's not really training content, is it? It's a poor excuse for online training. Well, you're going to see that with iSpring, what we're able to do is augment our familiar tool, PowerPoint, with incredibly powerful add-ons that are going to allow us to generate that online training content, which is what we really want to do. So let's first of all take a look at the iSpring suite here. You'll see they have a great website, and I'm not gonna go through everything on the website because it'd be quite a lot to do that, but I wanted to point out a few things specifically. I'll link down below in the description so you can get to the website here. You'll notice, first of all, on the iSpring website, there are three sections on the main page. There's the course creation toolkit. That's what we're gonna look at in this video. There's the learning management system, which I'll talk about in a subsequent video. So there's a full LMS that you can use. And then there's an e-learning library, which I think is fantastic, because there's all sorts of course templates, resources you can use, even full demos. And I'm gonna show you some demos in a moment as well. Now, another thing that I really like about the iSpring website is that they give me information on industry as well as specific use cases. So this is a really good way to sort of see the vision of a online course articulated by someone else through an example or through some suggestions. And that can really help with your specific area or industry. So for example, I used to have to train just dozens and dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of people on how to work in resorts and hotels. and it would've been fantastic to have had a tool like this where I could've had them go in at their own pace on their own time to get up to speed on some of the things that they needed to know in that environment. And there's a lot more here, there's a community, there's information about the iSpring products. And if I go to products, you'll see that there's the suite and there's the iSpring Learn. If I go into the course creation toolkit, you can get a free copy of iSpring Suite that you can use on a trial basis so that you can get some practice. And I think you're gonna find that you'll become very quickly excited to use it on a regular basis. Now, I also have on the iSpring website, there are some samples and some demos. One of my favorite demos, there's a lot in here, you can see that you can go in and look at course demos, video lecture demos, quizzes, dialogue simulations, interactions, even create eBooks using the tools. And there's some great demos in here. One of my favorite demos, I have to find it, there it is, Stay Safe Around Bears. So near and dear to my heart, because I live near the Canadian Rockies. So there are a lot of both grizzly bears and black bears here. So if I go here, and I actually was in here earlier, so I'll just start at the very beginning. Now, oh no, there's a bear, right? So you can hear there's some growling there. Let's make that full screen. And this is something that I can navigate as a learner on myself. And notice the first thing that I get is something exciting. Now I'm gonna mute the audio here. So we'll go in here and I can mute the audio. Now there is audio here, and you can see that I'm now in a simulation. You know, I'm gonna go hiking, I wanna go hiking, and then what happens is there can be some audio that plays. I can go in, and if I want to, I can skip the audio. So you can just go in there and skip the audio in there. I can go in and I can, you know, have information. And again, I can add audio here so that this can be narrated to me. I can use different voices and such. And you would think, well, this is gonna take a lot of work in order to build this. Actually not. you'd be surprised at how easy it is to build a simulation like this or to build an online course like this using the iSpring Suite. So let's escape out of this demo right now. So I'll come out of the demo and we'll go back to my PowerPoint. You might be like, well, why are we going back to PowerPoint? Well, when I install the iSpring Suite, it actually puts a plugin into PowerPoint. Now, everything you see here is also a standalone program with the iSpring Suite. So I could just open it up and do a simulation. I could open it up and create a quiz. But if I want to create that structure by using PowerPoint, I'm going to be able to go in and get this nice menu. So you can see here, I can do narration on there. I can do things like do an insert, things like a quiz, insert an interaction. So an interaction might be something like, for example, an image where I have hotspots on the image, or it could be, there's a lot of different interactions. We can do role-playing, which is that simulation that you saw in the bear demo. So I can actually build that and branch that. So one decision can branch in one direction, another decision can branch in another direction. So you can see that I'm really starting to be able to build a interactive and exciting and dynamic course for my learners. I can insert YouTube videos. For example, if you ever see the video, if you ever see the YouTube channel, Learning and Technology with Frank, there are some great videos there. You might want to insert those into your presentations and like and subscribe and all that sort of good stuff as well. You can see that I have a content library. I'm gonna cover that in just a moment here. You can work with slide properties, you can do translations, you can go in and preview your online course once you've created it, and you can then publish it to a number of different places. You can publish it to your learning management system or the iSpring learning management system. There is a ability to even post this out to YouTube. There's the ability to publish this to a website, if you have a website. So a lot of different options in there as well. When I created this Excel for data analysis course, I did so using the iSpring suite and the iSpring content library so that I could get a nice professional template and so that I could add a lot of different elements into this particular course. Then of course I could publish it as an online course. And if I take a look at the content library, things like slide templates, something you might expect in PowerPoint in general, but the iSpring content library templates are really nice. They're very professionally designed, so I use the urban template for my Excel course here. You can see here that I have all sorts of different slides that I could use, but one of the things I've noticed here is that we also have smartphone. So this is new to iSpring 11 and we can now target the smartphone as the consumer of our course. So the online course that we create can be specifically targeted to smartphone users. Now every template you can preview it was what it would look like in a computer environment and a tablet environment or a smartphone environment but having specific templates designed for smartphones is going to be very useful because a lot of people want to learn on the go so I can actually create content specifically geared towards smartphone learners and I could use this as a way of reinforcing what I've taught in the classroom or preparing people to participate in classroom discussion and they can review it as they're on their smartphone. So I use the computer for this particular slide deck you can see I could go in and choose for example a module title so I'll put that in there and it'll insert directly into my PowerPoint a new slide with that template looks very good and I can even use the iSpring suite to enhance the content by inserting different objects or different icons. So you have objects and icons changing backgrounds. One of the things that's very useful is the character feature. Now with the templates that iSpring has with the characters I can choose from a huge array of different characters that really really make my online content look much better. So I can choose for example between male and female I can choose between age groups I can choose between ethnicities of all sorts of different ways that I can sort through the different characters and for example I can even create a custom character so I can go into custom characters and I created this little character here the other day and this character has a number of different poses I can insert this character into my slide decks to add a lot of personality to my online content I'm going to go ahead and choose not to use that character and instead we'll go to the all characters option and I can choose photo characters or I could choose illustrated characters. I'm going to choose characters maybe a little bit younger 18 to 25 and I'm going to put them in a business environment. So let's say for example I wanted to create some training content and my main audience are students that are between 18 to 25 interns that have just come into my business and I want to chain train them on something for example on how to interact with customers or how to use a coffee machine whatever I want this is so quick to create content that I can really create training for almost any scenario and I can even go through and I'll have them talking so I have a character that's talking and I can take a look here and scroll down you see I've got a character this is Holly so let's grab Holly here and have her talking and I would like her to be facing forward. So she's gonna be facing forward. So I have the Holly character facing forward with a coffee cup and I'll add that to the slide. Now I have the Holly character added onto my slide. I can then go through and I can scale the character. So we can move Holly to the side here and I will scale her so that we're seeing basically waist up. So I can have Holly here and maybe this slide is something like how to get coffee in the office, right? So that might be, that would be a very important module when you're studying Excel for analysis is first of all, how to get a cup of coffee. So we're gonna go in there, but you can see that I've really added a lot to this slide very quickly using the content portion of the iSpring Suite. Beyond that, let's have a look here and look at what I find one of the most powerful elements, which is the ability to insert unique and custom slides. You can see here on the Excel course, I'll go down the side here, you can see I've done things like I've inserted YouTube videos into the slide deck. So this is a YouTube video where when the person's taking the online content, they'll be able to directly go out to this video and view this content from the course. I put in things like demonstrations in here. I even put in this very interesting simulation. This is a role playing simulation. You can create your own role plays by going in and choosing the role play. This will open up a separate tool in iSpring that allows me to create quite complex, but also quite easy to create role play simulations that will then be part of the online course. What's interesting here is that this then engages the learner to interact with the material and make decisions. So they're not just passively absorbing content, which isn't a great way to do things. What they're doing is they're participating in interacting with that content. This was a very simple simulation where all I did was I had my main slide. Underneath my main slide, they could branch either to, you know, I'm happy to be here, in which case, so glad you're here, or what, I don't need any feedback or training. In that case, they get fired. So this is a simulation. If I just double-click on the simulation, you can see that I have a happy character here. I've got images that I put in here. So actually, this is the Holly character as well. I could change the background depending on where Holly's going to be working. I can even load my own images here so I could take pictures of my own office environment or my own school environment and put Holly directly into that environment. So for example, here is I believe a cafeteria here. So you can see that I've got a cafeteria in here. I can do things like I can modify the properties here in terms of color schemes. And I can go through and I can add content here and then branch that content out. So now the learner, while they're taking the course, can make decisions and they can be rewarded or redirected if they make, redirected if they make an incorrect decision and rewarded if they make the correct decision. So you can have all sorts of branches, branches leading to branches, so on and so forth. And then when I've done those changes, I can actually go in and I can save and that will be pushed out to the online course. It's in PowerPoint, but then that will be published when I publish the course. So that's gonna push out to PowerPoint. Let's have a look at the PowerPoint. So now another thing that I added to this particular course was an interaction. And there are all sorts of really interesting interactions that I can have as well. So I can do things like hotspots. So I could have, for example, maybe I upload an image of the machine or I upload the image of a, in the case you saw the bear demo, I could upload an image of a bear and say what parts of the bear should you avoid? The teeth, the claws, those would be good things to avoid. What part of the bear would you like to see? The back end of the bear as it's leading you? But anyway, so I can go in here. So I have this interaction here. Again, I can make modifications to it. So if I go into the interaction here, you can see that I can make changes to this interaction. In this particular one, I just created a simple pyramid interaction. And as they navigate, as a learner navigates the pyramid, they can get information on each element of the pyramid. These again, there's a lot of different interactions that I can put into the environment. So this one here is, I'll just, I could even do a new interaction in here. But this particular one was an interaction where I did the pyramid in here. You'll also notice that when it launches as a separate tool, it gives me video tutorials, community information, and all sorts of different things that I can do here. I can also go in and preview the interaction, do things like translate this particular interaction. There's lots of different things I can do. In this particular interaction, you can see that I can add layers. I can do different work because this happened to be a pyramid interaction that I created. So you can see that I can make changes to it. Once I make those changes, save and return. In my case, I'll just close it because I'm not making any changes, but that appears on my slide. Then, once I've done all of this different work, and I'm going to create a subsequent video where I'll create a course from end to end using iSpring. This is more of an overview course, but this one here I can then preview my course so I can actually preview what this course will look like. And what's really interesting about the preview is that I'm going to be able to preview this course for not just a computer delivery model, but I can also preview it for a tablet or a smartphone delivery model as well. So it's going to go through, it's going to generate the course content here, and then I'll be able to preview it and see what it's going to look like. Now it takes a few moments to process all of the slides and the interactions and the simulations and everything, but this is what the user will see once they're presented with the online course. And as you saw in the bear demo, I could narrate different elements here, and that would be a good idea to narrate and walk people through the various slides that they're going through. But you can see here that everything here, There's the example of the module that I put in there with Holly and the coffee cup and such. And I can see what it would look like on a computer. I can see what it would look like on a tablet screen. So you can see the tablet screen, a tablet in landscape mode or in vertical mode. So you can see here that I've got what it would look like there. I could even see what it would look like on a smartphone. So I did not choose a smartphone template. If I was gearing the audience to be watching this on a smartphone, I would then use a template geared towards a smartphone. I can go in and you can see that I can just auto play it. So you can go in here and play it. It'll go through. I'll actually put that back to computer because that was my target for this particular course. And you can see that I can see all the different slides that are going through. I can progress to the next slide and see everything that I've created here. So this is a great way to deliver the online content. If I'm happy with this, I can close this down. on how we can use Excel data analysis. So that was an example of a demo that I had played during the online course. I'll close this down, and then one of the things that I can do is I can go into the iSpring suite, and if I'm happy with that course, I can then publish that course. When I choose to publish the course, notice I can publish it to my computer, to iSpring Space, to iSpring Learn, which is a full learning management system, to my own LMS, or even out to YouTube. I can give it a name. In my case, I'm putting this into a local folder that I'm going to use for this. Notice as well that I also have the ability to go in and choose different types of learning management system compliance types of things, for example, SCORM or AICC, different types of things in here. I can even customize the way that I publish this out. And then let's go ahead and publish this out to YouTube. Notice I can sign in directly to my YouTube account and I could go in and push this directly out with each slide lasting about five seconds, I can modify that. So I can have a self-running YouTube video, which is a tutorial. That's kind of an interesting thing as well. I'm pretty sure that you're thinking of all sorts of cool ways that you could use these tools in your own course creation. And I'd love to hear about those down below in the comments. Let me know which of the tools you think is the most useful for your situation and how you think you might use the tools in your own content creation. Now, there's more that iSpring has, beyond just the suite, and there's a lot to the suite, but they also have learning management systems and ways that we can collaborate on course creation as well. So I'm going to make some more videos on iSpring. Take a look at those videos. I'll link to them down below as I release them. You can subscribe and hit the bell notification to get notified of any future videos, and we'll see you in the next video. Take care.