I’ve been slightly surprised by what I have found.

Learning Management Systems

There seems to be a whole host of different solutions for the administrative side of providing training and education online. These are the various Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are available. They provide features to help you register students, schedule lessons and activities, collect together learning materials, and other sorts of tasks involved in running a training course.

There seem to be a number of commercial LMS products and web services available that are targeted either at the training needs of large commercial organisations or for use by educational institutions themselves. There are some open source alternatives, the dominant one appears to be Moodle.

I’ve had a little bit of a play with Moodle and I am impressed by the range of features and flexibility that underlie it. But it isn’t the most straightforward thing to use and would require a fair amount of development and customisation to offer a high quality tailored solution. If you were setting up a website to offer a range of training courses online it seems to me the most cost efficient approach to your LMS would be to use Moodle but invest in some technical expertise to help you develop it, possibly by integrating it with WordPress to produce a more attractive website.

Courseware presentations

The thing that has surprised me is the limited range of options for creating the online training courses themselves.

Obviously, there are lots of options for producing and hosting audio and video. Also for putting documents and presentations online. And you can of course create web pages of training materials in numerous ways. But the tools and products available to help you create interactive courseware seem to be limited in their use of technologies.

I once was a big fan of Authorware having used earlier versions of the software. This was mainly because of it’s underlying concept of dragging and dropping objects onto a ‘flow line’. Sadly Adobe, while still selling the product, has chosen to discontinue its development. The reason given is that;

 “The eLearning market has transitioned to Adobe Flash…”

It seems that if you what to create really engaging and interactive courseware that makes the most of the medium you really have only one choice and that is to use Flash.

If you wanted to do this is in a big way then you can make use of Adobe’s flash authoring tools. Such as Flash Professional, Adobe Captivate and Director. But this can be expensive. The Adobe eLearning suite for example currently costs £1,714.80.

PowerPoint to Flash

So the most common alternative to building a Flash presentation from scratch seems to be to use PowerPoint and then to use one of the available tools that converts a PowerPoint presentation in to the Flash file format.

There are a number of similar products on the market that do this. The common approach they take is to insert an extra menu tab into your copy of PowerPoint giving you the option to insert extra features like narration and to export as a Flash file. They will also package your presentation together with a Flash player so your file can be placed online and played.

The following products all take this approach:

• iSpring Pro
• Wondershare PPT2Flash Pro
• Articulate Presenter 09
• Adobe Presenter 7

While creating courses in this way is actually very straightforward and provides a very usable solution for a lot of people, I am pretty dubious about the merits of PowerPoint as a tool as it is. The logic and design behind the creation of a PowerPoint presentation, while familiar and easy for a lot of people to use, is restrictive. Is the conversion of lots of badly designed PowerPoint presentations, overflowing with bullet points, really what we want? What happened to the multimedia future we were promised?

Screencasting

For those creating courseware for training people in computer related activities, tutorials for the use of software products for example, there is also the related issue of screencasting.

Screencasting is;

“A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The term screencast compares with the related term screenshot; whereas screenshot is a picture of a computer screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on a computer screen, enhanced with audio narration.”

There are a range of software tools that can help you to create a screen cast as well as some web services specifically designed to host them;

• Camtasia Studio looks to be the best professional product for Windows
• Open source products for Windows are CamStudio and Wink
• I am also trying out recordMyDesktop for Linux
• Adobe Captivate can also be used for screencasting.

Problems with Flash

When used right Flash can do great things, but there are some problems with it. The obvious restriction is that Apple devices won’t accept it. If people want to look at your training courses on their iPhone or iPad they won’t be able to.

If you want to have your training available to the full range of mobile devices you will need to look at alternatives. You can return to making use of video, although this will sacrifice any interactive elements you have included.

More promising is the use of HTML5. I think this looks to be the best long term choice of alternative technology to replace Flash. But it still has a way to go before it matures and I haven’t found any authoring tools specifically designed to create HTML5 courseware.

So, for anything other than a big budget production, the solution seems to be writing your training course in PowerPoint, possibly adding extra video, and outputting in Flash.

Looking at the statistics provided by W3Techs shows that WordPress is used by 14.7% of the world’s top one million websites and over 54.5% of all those websites that use a CMS.

It is interesting to note that the next two most popular CMSs are both also opens source; Joomla with a 10% market share and Drupal with 6.2%.

The same sources provides figures for the use of CMSs by websites in the top one million that have a .uk top level domain. The dominance of WordPress is repeated here with a market share of 48.9%.

A similar pattern can be found in the CMS usage statistics provided by BuiltWith who currently reckon that WordPress is the most popular CMS used by Websites in the top million websites with a share of 63.19%.

More statistical information about the use of WordPress can be found here:

• W3Techs: Usage statistics and market share of WordPress for websites
• BuiltWith: WordPress Usage Statistics
• Statistics from WordPress.com

However I have just found a handy work around for many of these frustrations through the use of bookmarklets. Setting them up can be a little fiddly but once you have done so you can add some powerful extra functionality to the browser. This screenshot shows the bookmarklets I have added to ‘Save to’ folder on the Bookmarks Bar:

The following pages give instructions for how to do this and provides some of the necessary JavaScript code to create the bookmarklets.

Useful Bookmarklets for your iPad and iPhone

Bookmarklets for your iPad

I’ve also added a bookmarklet for the LibDig service. The JavaScript for this is as follows:

javascript:window.open('http://libdig.co.uk/add.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&t='+encodeURIComponent(document.title))()

She has implemented it with some nice customisations and has made good use of the full-width page template.

• Visit Lisa Smart’s website

Akismet – The standard way of protecting your WordPress website from comment spam.

Contact Form 7 – A simple but flexible plugin for creating web to email contact forms. Use this to create a way for visitors to email you from the website without making your email address visible online.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Add Google Analytics functionality to your website and keep track of your visitors.

Query Posts – “lets you displays a posts by nearly any criteria you can imagine using the query_posts() function, except you don’t need to know anything about PHP to use it.” This plugin provides a widget you can use so is useful for displaying what you want on the theme’s home page.

NextGEN Gallery – A sophisticated plugin for creating image galleries.

Widgets are independent sections of content that can be placed into the widgetized areas provided by the theme. The Lib Dem Aqua theme has eleven areas into which you can place widgets. These are;

• Five widget areas in the side bar
• Three widget areas in the centre of pages with any of the home page templates applied to it
• Three widget areas in the side bar of pages with any of the home page templates applied to it

To configure your widgets go to Appearance -> Widgets in your website’s dashboard. This will take you to the Appearance Widgets Screen.

The available widgets are shown in the centre and the widget areas are listed on the right.

To populate your widget areas with individual widgets, drag and drop the title bars into the desired area.

• More about the Appearance Widgets Screen

Choosing a blog style home page

A blog style home page shows your latest posts and news stories on the front page.

To set up a blog style home page go to Settings -> Reading in your website’s dashboard.

This will take you to the Reading Settings Screen where you should select ‘Your latest posts’ in the options for ‘Front page displays’ and then ‘Save Changes’.

This will make your post page your website’s home page.

Choosing a static page as your home page

First create two pages. Call one of them ‘Home’ and the other one something like ‘Latest posts’ or ‘News’. This last page will be your post page.

Then go to Settings -> Reading in your website’s dashboard.

This will take you to the Reading Settings Screen where you should select ‘A static page’ in the options for ‘Front page displays’. In the first drop down select the page you have created called ‘Home’. In the second drop down select the other page you have created. Then ‘Save Changes’.

Finally, check that both of these pages appear in your main navigation menu.

Using this method you can make any page in your website the home page.

You can now edit your home page just like any other page. Alternatively you can apply one of the three home page templates included in Lib Dem Aqua.

Using a home page template

You can have a more sophisticated home page with a prominent image, a custom menu and two areas for widgets by using one of the three home page templates included in the Lib Dem Aqua theme. This makes a home page which is very configurable:

To use one of the three home page templates first follow the instructions for choosing a static page as your home page above.

Next go to the page you are using as your home page and in the ‘Page Attributes’ box select one of the home page templates in the ‘Template’ drop down. Then update the page.

You have a choice of:

Home Style 1: Which adds the home page widgets, a custom menu, and an image that takes up the full width of the page under the header.

Home Style 2: Which adds the home page widgets, a custom menu, and an image that takes up the width of the first two columns of the page under the header.

Home Style 3: Which adds the home page widgets, a custom menu, and an image that takes up the width of the first second column of the page (the one containing the main content) under the header.

Next you need to prepare an image file to be displayed by the home page with the dimensions that match the template you have chosen. Once you have created this image you should upload it to your website.

Next get the URL of the image you have uploaded and go to Appearance -> LDA Options.

Enter the URL of the image into the ‘Home Page Image’ box on the Lib Dem Aqua Options screen and ‘Save Changes’.

Finally you should choose the widgets you want displayed on your home page.

Menu Slots

Within the theme there are four slots on the page layout where you can add your own custom menus. These are;

The Main Menu: This slot should be used for the main navigation menu of your website. If no custom menu is chosen it will default to displaying all your top level pages.

The Secondary Menu: This slot should be used for the secondary navigation menu of your website. It is useful for pages, such as a contact page, that you want available on every page of your website but that are not part of the main navigation. If no custom menu is chosen it will be left blank.

The Links Menu: This slot is used for links to important external websites. For example it can be used to link to the national party website. It is recommended that no more than three items should be placed in this menu. If no custom menu is chosen it will be left blank.

The Home Page Menu: This slot determines what is shown in the left-hand navigation column on pages that have one of the three home page templates applied to them. It is for a navigation menu specific to the home page. If no custom menu is chosen it will default to displaying the full hierarchy of your pages. Note that the items shown in the left-hand navigation column on other pages are chosen automatically and cannot be customised.

The location of these four slots for custom menus are indicated on the following diagram:

Creating Custom Menus

To create custom menus go to Appearance -> Menus in your website’s dashboard.

This will take you to the Appearance Menu Screen where you can:

• Create and name custom menus.
• Add Custom Links, Pages, and post Categories to those menus.
• Change the order and the titles of the pages in those menus.

You can then decide which of the menus you have created will go into which of the menu slots in the Lib Dem Aqua theme. You do this by using the Theme Locations dialogue:

• More help on using the Appearance Menu Screen

Lib Dem Aqua is a WordPress theme for Liberal Democrat websites. You can see it in action on the Luton Liberal Democrats website.

The theme aims to reflect the look and feel of the national party website and fit with the current Liberal Democrat branding by using an “aqua” colour palette.

Using an installation of WordPress, the Lib Dem Aqua theme, and selected plugins from the WordPress plugin directory; candidates, campaigners and local parties should have all they need to create and maintain an easy to use, flexible and professional looking online presence.

For more information about the theme and to download all the theme’s files visit it’s home page:

• Lib Dem Aqua WordPress theme