June 10-18 eLearning devcon 2011 in Salt Lake City

The Title V Project at Sagrado Corazón University in Puerto Rico provides us the way to get us to Salt Lake City Utah to attend the eLearning Devcon 2011. From June, 11 thru the 18^th we was with a bunch of good, knowledgeable people giving us the needed tools to engage the eLearning strategy. The 2O11 event was held at historic Fort Douglas on the beautiful campus of the University of Utah. Our first training was Flash Basics; the instructor was Jeff Batt a Learning instructor/Designer and Developer working for Rapid Intake an eLearning company based in Utah. He specializes in helping other people to develop eLearning courses without requiring any programming skills. He also is a consultant for Rapid Intake users helping them to take full advantage of this tool set. This training agenda was divided in eight topics that cover the Flash work Environment, Flash tools, Symbols like Movie clips, buttons and graphics, Animation, working with the timeline, motion presents, Importing artwork, using sounds and finally the Action Script uses for timeline navigation. Flash was our first key element to be taken in this conference just because we will focus our efforts to learn our primary application to develop eLearning modules using Articulate.

Articulate Package consist in three software packages; Engage, Presenter and Quiz Maker. Mr. Ryan Knight is a senior Principal Education Course Developer for Symantec Corporation who works as a technical trainer for more than 10 years as he told us in the training session. He was our instructor for the Pre-Training Basic and Advanced Articulate Engage eLearning software solution. Mr. Ryan shows how to modify the default colors xml files for interactions that do not support changing color schemes in Engage. Also he told how to add different media files formats to an interaction, customizing sounds and embedding interactive flash content using Captivate or Camtasia flash files, quizzes and other interactions like one using Google Sketch-up 3D. Another benefit of this conference training was the unknown web content resources available in the internet for eLearning. One good resource is a blog made by Dave Perso available at http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com that specializes in discuss articulate engage solutions and strategies for e-Learning interactions.

One of our best experiences during the conference was the session The Science of Memory. Dr. Art Kohn reveals the scientific research to give the insights of the secrets of learning and memory. He shows an interactive examples of the factors who increase or decrease learning and memory. Dr. Kohn is graduated from Duke University in cognitive science. His research explores how to present information in order to maximize learning and memory retention. He was awarded with the National Professor of the Year prize from the American Psychological Association (APA). A vast experience developing educational media products with companies like Prentice Hall, Worth and McGraw Hill). I will recommend USC to contact this resource for a conference for development of eLearning content and the methodology of present information to improve learning. This presentation was dynamic and proofs the effectiveness with real examples.

Another topic included in the conference was HTML5. The recent development in 2009 introduced the HTML5 coding structure for eLearning structures, web content development and portable devices eLearning interaction development. The recent improvement includes offline storage that provides a way to locally store your web content when you lose connection to the cloud. When the connection is restored this content will be uploaded and updated. For educational purposes a student will benefit from this technology when they are using mobile technologies and laptop devices, if they are taking a test and lost connection, the student will finish the test offline and later will upload the contents to the LMS and get his/her grades without any struggle. There are many others benefits in this HTML5 technology and USC will be moving forward to offer to our student community. In October, Rapid Intake is planning to offer another set of conferences in New York with the focus on the eLearning mobile technology. I hope USC consider to give us another opportunity to assist to the conference in NY.