Quiddis: an e-learning service meant for trainers
When people talk about e-learning services, they always focus on the learner’s point of view: the possibility to access training content anywhere and anytime, a user-friendly interface, interactive and tailored solutions. But what about who is in charge of building those contents? In this article we will try to describe why and how Quiddis was created primarily for trainers, in order to make everyone able to build content and manage academy communities online.
E-LEARNING: EVERYTHING STARTS WITH AN EDITOR
When we started thinking about creating an e-learning service, we came from the trainers’ side of the problem: how could someone build training materials in an easy way, without needing particular programming skills and sophisticated tools?
That is why our first idea of Quiddis was an editor: a simple platform to build online training basing on premade templates, an environment where every trainer could translate face-to-face lessons and static notes into interactive contents, responsive and ready to be shared with students.
As for now, our “editor” has grown up to be part of a design infrastructure which follows the trainer from the very first draft of his online lessons to the final issue, thanks to three easy-to-use complementary modules.
THREE MODULES, ONE DESIGN PLATFORM
The first step is Quiddis Note, a storyboard creator. Imagine having a pile of notes, pdf files or slides, and wanting to create e-training content: together with your texts, you have to decide what kind of multimedia materials need to be integrated, how and when. Quiddis Note allows the user to easily outline the lessons’ structure in a Microsoft Word-type platform, pointing out where to include audio, image, video or any other multimedia content.
Once the storyboard is created, it’s time to fill it up with real contents: this is when Quiddis Edit comes to hand. All the raw materials are adjusted and built together in the lesson’s structure, which can then be finalized and stored, waiting to be delivered.
But those raw materials represent a real asset for the organization and the trainer: this is why the last, but not least, element of this infrastructure is Quiddis Safe. This in-cloud repository stores multimedia contents safely and, above all, tracks all changes made through time, allowing to recover older versions and re-use the same contents in different contexts and lessons.
SIMPLE IS KEY: AN LMS FOR EVERYONE
Keeping focusing on trainers, once the lessons are ready to be delivered, it’s time to move to a Learning Management System. We will talk in depth about what an LMS is in a dedicated article, but for now you can think of it as an online academy, where each element of (online) training is integrated and managed: trainers, students, courseware, lessons, reports generated, everything kept under control in one place. Therefore, we decide to add Quiddis Espy to our suite, the heart of training management.
If you start searching for LMSs, you will find a number of platforms, either open source or licensed, each one with its own features and peculiarities: for us, the key-factor is user-friendliness. It is well known that the back-end part of processes could be very complicated: our twenty years’ experience in working with different people and organizations taught us to simplify as much as possible, so that our tools is understandable and usable not only by engineers and software developers, but by everyone independently from their “digital background”.
LEARNING WHERE, WHEN AND HOW YOU LIKE IT
The very last step of e-training shifts the focus to learners: Quiddis Play is a simple application, available for all desktop and mobile devices, which allows learners to access content assigned to them, in different languages, both online and offline.
In addition to the obvious benefits for students, this player has a special consideration for trainers too: in fact, despite allowing to download lessons, it keeps everything locked and safeguarded from duplication, while generating reports of students’ progresses for the LMS. This gives more freedom to learners in the short period, without trainers to lose track of the class in the long run.
But why we did all that? Our reason is based on the belief that the e-learning represents a powerful tool to engage students and boost training effectiveness.
Do you want to know more about this? Find out in the next article!