BP3_Udutu

It always takes time to find something really good.  Prior to discovering Udutu, I had to go through each 58 other eLearning companies listed under the eLearning tag in Gotoweb20, which tracks web2.0 tools. The eLearning companies I checked were mostly diverse, serving different functions within the eLearning space. Some stood out - such as www.visualthesaurus.com/, which helps visual thinkers by creating drawings of anything you want to know about.  One innovative company www.activeallowance.com provides a way for kids to get smart about money - a very smart idea by itself. There were a couple companies such as www.mindbites.com and www.graspr.com that focus mostly on video based learning. Some such as www.wiziq.com and www.buddyschool.com promise to help people teach online and learn online. I also ran across yacapaca.com/, which specializes in online assessment.  I am recording these in my blog, because I want to check these further too.

After looking at all the companies I short listed two, catering to an area I was interested in - online course authoring. One of the companies was www.eduslide.com and the other was www.udutu.com. Of these, I chose Udutu for two reasons. A comparison of pricing plans of both indicated that Udutu had more free features than Eduslide  - Udutu allows you to create your own course through their course authoring system and then extract the course for free and host it from any server of your choice. If you want Udutu to host it for free, you can host a watermarked version of Udutu. Another reason for choosing Udutu, was the really elaborate tutorials it has on its home page.

I played the tutorial "how to build effective online courses and simulations".  It is a 25 screen audio and text tutorial that cover a wide range of topics such as online learning, basic principles of pedagogy, learning outcomes, Blooms taxonomy and using rich learning media in eLearning.

Once I settled on Udutu as my Web 2.0 tool of choice, my next step was to use the register and see how easy it would be to create an eLearning course using Udutu. Udutu provides a tutorial called "learn how our tool my Udutu works". Going through the tutorial helped. My first use of Udutu was a bit of struggle though. This was primarily because each screen you have to fill out while creating a course has many options, buttons and tabs and it takes time to figure out what purpose they serve towards the final look and feel of the course.

Udutu allows you to either create a course from scratch or use an existing template that you can copy and then modify as you go along. I tried the obvious and used an existing template with the intent to modify it. However, I found it had a steeper learning curve. I abandoned that approach in favor of creating a new course from scratch. This was a smarter idea.

Within and hour and a half, I was able to create 4 screens of a prototype on fast math tricks. I had the option to insert images, voice commentary, videos and animations as rich media. I chose images since they were the simplest to create and use for the prototype. For each content page of my course, I chose to make it either a basic screen or an assessment screen. Both basic and assessment screens came with a host of templates to choose from. I found the assessment template with multiple choice questions very useful and easy to set up.There were may other options such as an advanced screen, add scenario, import powerpoint, and a group option that I did not use for my course prototype. The images below show my course prototype screens.

I had a good feeling about Udutu to start with. After watching the founder's video and seeing the accolades it had received, listed out on the website, it reaffirmed my thinking that Udutu is one of the best free course authoring tools in Web 2.0 today. I also believe that once you go through the initial hurdle of figuring out the screens and creating a small trial course, Ubutu might just amaze you with all the features it has.