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ICT solutions for e-learning

The market offer a wide range of software and solutions to implement ICT and e-learning in IVET in Kyrgyzstan.
The first distinction has to be done between available opensource and proprietary licensed software. This distinction has to be thought in terms of potentials of the investment and returns in the long view. The proprietary software are usually most performant and needs less capacities by the users. The opensource solutions in opposite usually require more knowledge and often are poor of documentation. Starting from the principle that the ICT world is in continuing evolution, both software are in the same need to be continuously updated to face the necessary adaptation to the hardware changes and offer.
This means that there is a trend to increase progressively the dimensions of bought, by one side, the big names of the commercial market that tend to be always more influent and to acquire the promising start up and by the other side, the communities of developers that tend to aggregate as much member as possible to increase their own specific weight.
Both parts wish to grow and to appear more reliable against the clients that look for software or on demand services that can continue for a while.
Giving this premises, it is our opinion that in a situation like the Kyrgyz IVET system, the most attention in the software selection process has to be focused to identify low costs / adequate maturity solutions. So, this means to apply the two variables looking for low costs solutions but asking for a certain level of maturity of the software to assure an acceptable intrinsically quality.
This reflection also includes that the state of the art of the infrastructures doesn't allow us to consider cloud-based authoring systems as solutions to be adopted because this could mean to cut off big part of the IVET schools from the possibility to use the software.
Thus, our attention has to be addressed to stand alone platform to be installed on the local computers. This fact reduce significantly the number of products currently available.
This consideration has a double value:

  1. in one side, this means the need to produce stand alone learning courses and therefore identify stand alone software that will be installed on local computers.
  2. In the other side it is significant to consider that the learning management system will have, in a future perspective, to be installed on a server and the schools will access increasing their number in parallel with their access to Internet.

The on demand services constitute the wider offer, but we have to exclude it, so in terms of the commercial authoring stand alone software available, there are only few products, to be taken in consideration on the market. The most known is Captivate by Adobe, sided by other related products of the same house, than Articulate, produced by Articulate Global Inc. and some more.

Pay attention: These software demand powerful machines and have a considerable cost for the licenses.

In opposite to these stand alone proprietary solutions there are free and open source software. In this case the panorama is little bit wider and is possible to find authoring software for free also from Google and Microsoft. The Google Course Builder is based on Open edX technology, is downloadable but quit complicated to be understood, installed, implemented. The outputs of this tool are quite good, but require an expertise that is absolutely not available in an early beginner user. Google Course Builder, is open source and is at the end an online education platform that can be sourced with file produced with the stand alone application. It has rich features set and allows to keep relationship with the students, but is totally not feasible for Kyrgyz IVET system.
The Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is also a free tool that enables to create high-quality, interactive, online courses and Microsoft Silverlight Learning Snacks. The LCDS allows anyone in the Microsoft training and certification community to publish e-learning courses and Learning Snacks by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactive activities, quizzes, games, assessments, animations, demos, and other multimedia. Both these product allow to prepare e-learning contents that can run in a local machine without the need to be uploaded on the server.

If Google Course Builder is quite complicated, the Microsoft Learning Content Development System is instead quite simple and could be an option.

Pay attention: the Microsoft Learning Content Development System requires the installation of other Microsoft components even if these are also free and the export functionalities not always work properly. 

The Microsoft Learning Content Development System is anyway very similar to another platform open source developed by a community of educational organizations:

eXelearning.
The tool is similar for the functions to the Microsoft tool, but is more simple and maybe also more powerful. After a few days of our test, the eXelearning was appearing more stable and reliable and so it is the solution more suitable that we could suggest for you.

exelearnig logo

eXeLearning was originally developed in New Zealand, in 2007, and was led by two universities (University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology) and the Tairawhiti Polytechnic Institute. The project was originally supported by the New Zealand government, and it was later supported by many other institutions.
The original project remained active until 2010. At that time eXeLearning had thousands of users and it was a very well known authoring tool in educational environments.
In 2009-2010, the Instituto de Tecnologías Educativas del Ministerio de Educación del Gobierno de España (now INTEF) decided to restart and to evolve the project. The new eXeLearning, as it was named, would keep alive the original open source spirit of the project, adapting the application to new web developments and standards and introducing major improvements.
A new eXeLearning website was developed, a site that allows the users to actively participate in the project: make contributions, suggestions, find answers to different questions....
Now the project is, again, alive and kicking, and it is supported by different government agencies and companies, both in Spain and in other countries all over the world. As it can be seen with the recent release, last September, of eXeLearning 2.0. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXeLearning)

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