Introduction
Across the roles I have held in learning technology, I have been fortunate to have access to a range of different types of software, systems and technologies to improve or facilitate learning – some of these have been run-of-the-mill, and some have been bleeding-edge and fun, but somewhat impractical to roll out on a wide basis.
The learning technologies I have worked with fit largely into three categories:
- material creation — software, hardware and services that exist to create learning and teaching content, guides and media
- assistive – software and hardware that enables people with disabilities, injuries, or additional learning needs to access learning materials and complete learning activities.
- infrastructure — software, hardware and services that provide baselevel access to or functionality for online learning. This might include LMS provision, and a range of different hardware and network devices.
What makes a technology appropriate depends upon the needs of the learners, teaching staff or subject experts, and the learning need to be met. I have worked in a variety of different settings and disciplines, each with their own expectations and accepted methods for teaching and learning.
In this section, I will discuss the use of a variety of technologies across material creation and assistive software. These will include:
- Articulate Rise and Storyline
- speech to text software
1. Articulate Rise
What is it?
AR is an online content creation tool for e-learning, which I have been using since it was first launched in 2016. Rise allows you to create online courses by combining blocks of content into sections using a web-based interface. There are numerous block types, ranging from text and image blocks, through to quizzing, tab interactions and storyline blocks that can contain fully interactive material.
What can it do?
AR includes a standardised menu system, and can be exported for use on the web, or as a SCORM object for use on an LMS. You can create varied and interesting courses using Rise — but it has limitations and can result in formulaic, highly standardised ‘information’ resources as opposed to true learning material.
Limitations
AR was designed primarily for corporate training material, a fact that is evidenced by the lack of customisability of elements such as the Scenario block.
The usefulness of this particular block is heavily limited by:
- An enforced, but automatically blurred background
- The mandatory use of a character from Articulate’s library – these are all fairly corporate, so unsuited to many HE applications; it’s not possible to use custom characters
- A limit of 200 characters on all text/dialogue elements
AR can also only handle fixed-response questions, either multiple choice or multiple response. It doesn’t support the use of open-ended or short answer reflective questions. Some community-developed code modifications can add these features, at the expense of a more complex publishing process.
These design decisions are typical of the types of limitations AR has on customising block and course design, from only having one accent colour for all buttons, bullets, links and other elements to requiring ‘correct’ answers for questions that could otherwise be used to indicate preference or thoughts, it is easy to have a vision for something you want to achieve in AR and be stymied by the reality of what is possible.
It is possible to create engaging learning using AR — with proper planning, and a good understanding of digital pedagogy. AR is very fast to put together when you have a comprehensive storyboard or course plan. It is easily understood by most people with moderate IT skills, and with training and support they can create their own material, or take over maintenance of the core material made by a developer.
AR is a subscription product bundled with AS in the Articulate 360 product. It’s cost-effective for HE institutions, but access is contingent on retaining the subscription, unless there is another user you can transfer them to. In practice, this adds up to difficulty in moving away from Articulate products for frequently updated courses, unless it’s desirable to redevelop them using alternative tools.
2. Articulate Storyline (AS)
What is it?
Articulate Storyline (AS) is a downloadable software product that allows you to create entirely custom interactive learning materials that can stand alone on the web, on an LMS as a SCORM package, or embedded into an AR course.
What can it do?
Developing courses in AS can be done simply, using provided templates, but to create something truly interactive and custom requires a high level of skill and experience with the software. Highly complex material can be created using features such as variables, triggers, motion paths and layers. Having used AS since 2013, while I have always tried to make my interactive materials engaging, my skills with the software have grown over time and now allow me to produce complex, attractive and educationally beneficial learning experiences. While I have produced many stand-alone AS packages, I also regularly produce small self-contained interactions that can be embedded into AR courses to improve interactivity, tell stories and extend its functionality.
Limitations
Both AR and AS allow you to create accessible material, though this requires engagement with the accessibility options and features of each to maximise this, including compatibility with screen readers and other assistive technology. I will discuss some of these features and the challenges associated with them in section 3A.
Many Storyline courses I’ve seen in the past treat the software as if they were making a PowerPoint presentation, using extensive on-screen text, minimal imagery, and having the learner page through them by clicking next. Translating slideshows into “e-learning” is one of the key mistakes that drives learners’ dismissal of online learning as boring, ineffective and irrelevant.
AS can be frustrating to use, and the sheer amount of choice available to the developer can result in messy, ineffective, or passive e-learning. From a developer’s perspective, some interface limitations make developing content more difficult, challenging and confusing. Working with triggers allows you to create very complex material, but these can quickly become hard to manage. Triggers are not searchable or filterable, and there is currently no way to mass replace variable references.
I would not recommend training teaching staff to use AS to either create new or maintain existing material unless they are extremely competent IT users who have worked with concepts related to digital content authoring previously, since it requires a good understanding of both the software and digital pedagogy, cognitive load, design aesthetics and multimedia development principles to create something effective, accessible and attractive.
While AS is also included as a subscription product, a perpetual licence can be purchased and files can be retained and shared as a backup if the 360 licence expires.
3. Assistive technology – Dragon Naturally Speaking
In this section, I also wanted to say something about my own personal experience of using speech-to-text software, which is something I’ve been working with for several months. Last year, I was diagnosed with mild arthritis in some of my fingers, and after a number of years with nerve problems affecting my hands and wrists, it seemed like a good time to think about how to preserve the function of my hands in the long-term, and also to reserve my hands for activities that really need it. I thought that dictation software might help, given that I have to type quite a lot as part of my job.
Of the software available, our CIS department was able to purchase Dragon Naturally Speaking for me as part of its assistive technology options. Dragon is also the industry standard piece of software for dictation and computer control. The computer control aspect was less important, but could also be useful in reducing the need to use a mouse — which is one of the things that causes me the most problems.
Affordances and related challenges
The software itself has quite a few affordances. It can both convert speech to text and also correct text in a variety of applications, including Microsoft Word and the rest of the office suite, certain web browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, and has the ability to add additional custom commands to allow you to build up a personal command library that can complete some keyboard and mouse tasks using your voice – for example, keyboard shortcuts and. It boasts a high accuracy rate, but to achieve this accuracy rate must be trained. This means that as the software makes mistakes, you have to do manually correct it each time by telling the software which parts to correct and how to correct them. New terminology also needs to be trained, so you can add new words and then train it so that it knows how you say that word. All this means that in order to get the full use out of the software, you have to spend an extensive amount of time teaching it, both what you’re likely to say and how you say it. This does result in a fairly clunky onboarding process, including a lot of ‘scratch that’, ‘correct that’, ‘spell that’ type commands, which can rapidly get frustrating and also interrupt your thought process.
Dragon can be set to always on, and can be paused and re-activated by voice command. Dragon can also not just work from direct speech spoken into the computer — it can also take dictated audio files and transcribe those. In fact, this is how the first draft of this part of my portfolio is being written. I am currently recording an audio file in audacity; I will then feed this into Dragon as a .wav file and see how it handles it. This does also mean that you can use things like dictaphones or voice memo recording functions on a smartphone to create an audio file for transcription.
Alternatives
Dragon is a fairly expensive piece of software, with the list price of the Professional Individual version that I have costing in excess of £400. There are no-cost alternatives available; for example, Google Docs has a voice typing functionality which is pretty good, but only works within those documents, and only in Chrome, so it’s very limited in its application. Windows and MacOS both have inbuilt tools, as do iOS and android operating systems for phones and tablets. However, these also have some restrictions. They cannot control the computer or device to the same degree, and, in my experience, have lower accuracy rate and lack the same support for voice training and custom words; you can add words to the dictionary, but you can’t train them in the same way that you can Dragon. Mac OS’s dictation functionality requires an internet connection unless using an M1/Apple chipset, and times out after 30 seconds with no dictation.
Usefulness
By far the hardest thing is getting used to dictating rather than typing. For the last 30 years or more, I have typed my thoughts. My fingers seem to know what to write before my mouth knows how to say what I want. This means that dictating requires a lot of thinking and planning; I don’t find it nearly as fluid as typing. Therefore, documents take much longer to write, at least at the moment. I’m hoping that this will get easier the more I use it. You also have to say your punctuation, which completely scrambles my brain at times.
In terms of overall impressions of Dragon — I think that the functionality is quite good, though the interface and general look of the product are kind of outdated. The application is still 32-bit, and the updater software that is bundled with it was released in 2011. It feels like a product that has been made complacent by its status in the market, since there are not many, or indeed any real professional alternatives available. For example, one of the issues I came across was that whilst you are advertised as having full command control over the web browser, in practice, certain things don’t work the way you would expect them to. I am writing this on WordPress., however, the new WordPress Gutenberg block editor is not supported. I can dictate into it, and no words will ever show up. Since I am dictating most of this portfolio, this has meant that I have had to dictate into Microsoft Word before tidying it up and pasting the final version into WordPress.
In the dictation, I reached this point before I realised that I had forgotten to include any paragraph separators at all – dictating is hard!
Overall, I think that this software has promise in my own workflow, but that is going to take quite a lot of effort to get it to where it needs to be. Speech is not a very natural mode of communication for me in terms of more academic, less conversational language. I will continue using it, because I can see that if I can, it will really help keep my hands and wrists safe, hopefully for the rest of my career. Using assistive technology like this is an interesting experience, and there’s no substitute for that experience when it comes to thinking about how our students are impacted by their own limitations that may require such software. I would recommend anyone involved in learning technology tries some of these pieces of software — find the frustrations that they encounter and increase the level of empathy they might have, and the level of consideration they put into their decisions, and their designs.