Upping the ante

2013 was a year of epic proportion as the world watched hundreds of new trends and applications develop into billion dollar companies. With the overwhelming amount of new technology being released on a regular basis, do you ever wonder how you’re supposed to keep up? We do. That’s why we’re determined to provide you with functional, user friendly interfaces that don’t make you feel you’ve been left in the dust. So if you are feeling a little left behind, here’s a quick recap of last year’s developments.

The Udutu mission is to make online learning an effective, easy to use strategy for organizations of all sizes. That is why our authoring tool is free! So that you are not limited by licensing requirements that restrict who can be involved in creating courses, and one person doesn’t have to be an expert in all aspects of course creation. It’s also why we have now broken the LMS barrier. It often took months and lots of money to deploy a powerful, scalable Learning Management System. You can now be up and running with a fully customized hosted system in less than a half hour, and for less than twenty dollars.

Udutu Hosted Learning Management System (LMS)

Some really innovative folks at Udutu™ created this fully functioning LMS because the options available on the market were just not cutting it. It’s specifically designed to work with SCORM compliant courses (a standard in the industry, meaning Sharable Content Object Reference Model). Naturally you need to start with course content, which can be created in either our own authoring tool (www.myudutu.com), or in another SCORM compliant course authoring tool.

This robust and scalable LMS lets you manage user access levels, set course prerequisites, and integrate other types of learning activities. These include tasks and face-to-face sessions, creating learning paths or curriculums and generating custom reports to help you manage and track your courses and users. You can manage as few as ten – or as many as a hundred thousand learners in the same LMS! If you are a course reseller, you can even set up a fully customized iteration for each of your major clients, or simply manage them all in a single iteration and separate them by “groups” or by organization.

Our full-featured, hosted LMS provides:

• Access to your own private LMS account(s).
• Customized branding, look and feel for any number of LMS accounts you may require.
• Customized groupings and even ad-hoc ‘classrooms’ for your learners to ensure only those who should see a particular course can do so.
• Entire curriculum tracking; tasks, meetings and exercises, in addition to your online courses and tests.
• Unlimited monitoring of your learners’ progress with our system’s extensive, extractable reporting capabilities.
• Integration with Citrix GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar software.
• Bonus! 50 FREE LMS Learner Credits upon initial activation (a $250 value!)

As a subscribed member to the Udutu™Guru Pro Membership, you also have the ability to charge a fee to access your courses via the LMS! Find out more at: Guru Memberships Comparison.
Facebook as a Learning Platform

Is social media finally becoming an accepted part of your workday? In many ways, applications like Facebook and LinkedIn do much of what we expect from a learning community. Back in 2007 we thought we could turn Facebook into an LMS, and so our Teach and Learn apps were released in early 2008. Unfortunately many IT departments at the time wouldn’t let users access Facebook so we didn’t invest any further in those apps – until last year! IT departments have finally started to recognize that social media is here to stay. We’re happy to say that UdutuTeach and UdutuLearn are too.

So we have released UdutuTeach/UdutuLearn V 2.0

UdutuTeach & UdutuLearn: Facebook Plugins

You may remember a few years ago when we turned Facebook into a powerful LMS with our UdutuTeach and UdutuLearn Plugins, well in 2013 we introduced version 2.0! For anyone not familiar with our Facebook apps, UdutuTeach allows you to import courses from the course authoring tool, Udutu Authoring, to Facebook. You can manage which people can take your courses and track the learners’ progress. You can even assign certificates to be awarded to your learners upon completion of an activity, bundle activities into a learning path (or curriculum) and enable discussions.

UdutuLearn lets your student view courses that they have been given access to and shows details of their progress.

What is new you might ask?

• addition of learning paths
• integration with GoToTraining/GoToMeeting
• improved reporting functionality
• ability to track F2F and other learning activities
• certificates of completion
• branching learning paths allowing more flexibility in curriculums.

For higher engagement and to simplify your course offering, install the new and improved UdutuTeach and UdutuLearn Facebook plugins today.

HTML5 & Dynamic Templates

In the last two years we have seen a rapid adoption of devices for searching and delivering information. This has created a requirement for content to scale to dimensions and aspect ratios that are different to the common computer screen. The evolution of HTML and browsers has allowed Udutu to create code that will dynamically display your course in the appropriate size and shape for the device you are using. Although there are a couple limitations you should know about:

• While such things as images, graphics, animations and movies will automatically rescale, font sizes may not, depending upon the browser and the font you selected.
• Not all browsers fully support HTML5, and so content you have published in that format may not display, particularly on older versions of Internet Explorer.

HTML5 is “still not quite the resolved” standard that has enabled these innovations, and its acceptance was accelerated by the success of iPads and iPhones, which don’t support Flash. Since animations that previously required Flash are also potentially possible with HTML5, it seems logical that it could eventually become the universal standard. On the downside, HTML5 animations take longer to produce than Flash. Of course there are millions of Flash animations already deployed on the internet so some may argue that Flash will take a while to fade away – if ever. In the meantime we live in a world where both Flash and HTML5 are still widely used and are mutually incompatible on some devices.

Not to worry! Udutu has provided you with the ability to easily republish old courses that you may have created before the adoption of HTML5. They display and function on platforms such as iPads that do not support Flash. However, you may need to publish two versions of a course if you have clients who are still using Internet Explorer versions prior to IE10. It all comes down to ensuring your clients are enjoying their experience with your course. The ongoing uncertainty around the HTML5 standard means that all the browsers treat code slightly differently, so for the coming year we anticipate ongoing issues as you try to publish content that will work seamlessly across all platforms. Nevertheless, we are committed to staying in front of the curve. Udutu, training solutions that work.