In late October an annual eLearning conference dedicated to training within companies - DevLearn 2013 - was held in Las Vegas. The conference and the exhibition were organized by the eLearning Guild, which is one of the most active and dominant elearning communities (The second one being ASTD). In this article, I would like to share with you some highlights and observations from the DevLearn 2013. Let’s start from a well-known vendor - Articulate, which continues to develop tools for tests. Articulate has recently made an attempt to introduce elements of content-authoring tools into their assessment editor. This is reflected, for example, in the following functions: - using uploaded images for creating drag'n'drop exercises (sorted by type, finding a matching pair)- using characters in assessments- creating additional effects and movements of objects This year Adobe places emphasis on video tools. At the Adobe booth was demonstrated a product, which allows making simultaneous records from camera and from desktop, to mix them together and overlay one on another. Immediately after recording a course developer can mark on the timeline when he would like to display video from the camera and when he would like to display video from the desktop. He can also chose the option of combining video from the camera with one from the desktop and then decide which of them is the dominant. One of the most popular booths at the exhibition was the eLearning Brothers’ booth, a company providing template packages, themes and characters for course editors. The company is a leader in this field and provides services to both individuals and eLearning vendors. Articulate Storyline also uses ready-made solutions provided by eLearning Brothers, to offer its users graphical objects. The eLearning Brothers’ products have become the model product in the market. One can buy eLearning Brothers’ graphical objects packages and use them in many popular course editors. A new supplier in the market eLearning services - Geenio - was introduced at the conference. In fact, Geenio is LMS with a built-in course editor and tools for test developing. The system is designed to work through web browser without any additional installation on client’s computer. Geenio - Content Authoring Tool Geenio focuses on user-friendly and easy-to-use interface, one we are used to see in modern Internet services. Most extraordinary fact about Geenio is that it is able to work on tablets directly out of the box. Moreover, on iPad you can not only view completed courses, but also create new ones or edit existing ones. Perhaps this is what most surprised guests at the Geenio both in DevLearn. Geenio also allows creating non-linear courses with Pathboard, this tool appears to be innovative and has high usability. Geenio - Pahtboard Geenio also plans to add gamification elements. Not just for learning about the product, but also for providing course authors with such tool. There are many other interesting ideas in this project, some of which have already been implemented. Closed beta testing will start soon, but so far only for those who have signed up to participate during DevLearn. Pathgather is another new product on the market. Visually, it resembles Geenio a lot, but the goal is different and less global. The basic idea is social learning as a basic tool for collaborative work in the corporate sector. It is a modern, visually-attracting LMS with an emphasis on social interaction. Pathgather - Learning Path Pathgather offers a tool for convenient storage and cataloging of thousands of online courses and other different sources in one handy place. With a help of Pathgather each employee can compile a "learning path". In other words, he can share his own methods of learning new stuff, making a "path" of successive resources. The Pathgather’s designers also promise to present a rich set of statistics and a tool for analysis of trends and employees’ activity within the organization. Now Pathgather is undergoing a recording on early access to the product. However, one can preview the product right now and see how attractive it is and how smoothly it works. HapYak has been also presented at DevLearn 2013. Their slogan is "No matter how you use video, interactive video is more effective. We make it easy". HapYak knows to create link on a specific moment in video. You say, it is not surprising, YouTube has long been able to do it. However, HapYak take it further by creating a simple navigation interface inside video, wh ere one can click on the link in the navigation menu and get transferred to the right place. HapYak - Navigation Panel There is also an ability to embed questions into video, known as Videoquiz. It supports both multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions allowing one to enter any text he would like to. There is a possibility of integration of HapYak with Pearson eCollege and other LMS. HapYak - Video Quiz In addition, it is possible to make marks directly inside the video in order to highlight something important or to share an expert opinion in an easy way. HapYak - Drawing This year HapYak also promises to provide detailed statistical reports. What links do users click on? What makes them watch videos longer than usual? What users are the most involved? Reports at the user level, and integration with popular statistics tracking tools, apparently with Google Analytics.

The annual e-learning conference eLearning Elements 2014 was held in Moscow, May 28th - 29th. The conference hosted by E-Learning Center, one of the biggest players at Russian e-learning market gathered together best education professionals, specialised software vendors and companies that looked for improvement in their learning processes. The conference had the round table format where attendees could discuss the broad range of industry issues starting from "Selling the idea of e-learning to top managers" and ending with "Freud’s Elearning". A distinguished part of all conversations was dedicated to gamification, the motive of which sounded in discussions that were not related to it even remotely. A new product - Geenio - was presented to the Russian market. The Geenio’s booth was very popular among attendees who demonstrated a live interest in the product and provided a lot of valuable feedback.Guests of Geenio’s booth were impressed by the lightweight and intuitive user interface, that allowed to create non-linear interactive courses with several drag-n-drops. No one could believe that it was really possible to create a branched course right in the browser without a single line of code. It is safe to say that Russian market needs an easy to use and still fully functional software. Moreover, many attendees said they needed a competence management mechanism built in the LMS. This would help to standardise employees’ education and guarantee the consistent result of trainings. Geenio team plans to participate other e-learning events and communicate with companies that run the e-learning project to understand their needs and demonstrate the newest industry trends implemented in the product.

by Michael TreserThe last few years have drastically changed the approach to how people interact with e-learning courses and how those courses are created. Modern trends supported by public opinion push e-learning authors towards producing something that is absolutely beyond our understanding about regular online courses.Many innovations are fleeting, unable to stand the test of time. Some new ideas, however, not only continue to grow into real life examples, but also find applications in day-to-day operations of many industries. We started crafting Geenio because we urgently needed a convenient, easy-to-use solution to create our own courseware. But, we could not find software that would satisfy those requirements. At that time, half of our team worked as instructional designers and trainers, and the need to produce competitive learning materials and run education within the company at affordable costs and minimal efforts was a real driver for making yet another e-learning application. It was an alternative to lowering our requirements and working with the solutions available, and the fun fact is that the members of our team came to that conclusion at the same time independently of one another.  That said, we decided to build our own tool with blackjack and gamification: a tool that would allow us to benefit from the latest achievements of the industry and cover our usage scenarios. The one requirement was that the tool adhered to modern web application standards - we were all tired of the mid-90s-like software interfaces that we used at that time.  We developed the idea, and it gradually turned into a product model with software requirements. By that time, we already had our team, in which each person had a very clearly defined role and mission in the project. Software developers and designers jumped in and brought a lot of fancy and outstanding features to the product. Initially, we were obsessed with the desire to add as many modules and functions into the product as possible. The reality, however, proved that it was not possible to do everything in the first version of the product. So, we decided to create functions to address only the main issues in the initial version of the product: -    Course authoring tool (The Editor) -    Assessment engine -    Learning management system  What are non-linear courses and what do we need those for?  We had a very special set of requirements for the course editor because we wanted to build non-linear courses that would adjust in complexity depending on the student’s abilities and change the way the student would go through the course. Our observations revealed that each student’s attitude and comfort were the cornerstones for a successful learning experience. Positive emotions helped the students to digest new information and later turn it into skills. An overly complicated course would demotivate students and the only result will be tiredness and dissatisfaction. An overly simplistic course, on the contrary, would make a learner bored. Such a learner would simply be clicking through the course, instead of gaining new skills. The main conclusion from these observations was the need to adapt the complexity of a course to the student’s level of knowledge. The purpose of non-linear courses is to enable course authors to build varied complexity courses by modifying the presentation of materials in response to student performance and demonstrated level of knowledge. That’s why we built the Pathboard. The Pathboard is the special course-authoring mode which can be used to add new pages, sets of pages (lessons), questions and sets of questions (tests) to your course, and interconnect those in any combination.  A course author always sees all possible learning paths and course branches because the Pathboard represents non-linear courses in an intuitive and easy-to-use visual manner. The main idea behind the Pathboard is that there may be several parallel ways to go through the course. Initially, a student may start at the medium level of complexity and after few pages takes an assessment that gauges the current level of knowledge. As a result, we may redirect the user to a more advanced path, stay at the same level or even go to a more detailed explanation of basic things, depending on what the course author decides.  There is no limitation for your creativity while crafting a course - you may make knowledge checkpoints throughout the course and direct your audience to appropriate learning paths. Just be careful to avoid creating excessive entities.  Gamification. The downfall of many.  At the very beginning of our project we decided that gamification would be a mandatory component of our product. Game mechanics built into the learning process appear to be one of a few elements that make courses really engaging. That, in turn, helps students make a breakthrough in gaining new skills and knowledge. A fascinating course by Kevin Werbach made our desire to implement gamification in Geenio even stronger.  Despite the popularity of gamification and the plenty of available materials, it appeared to be the most difficult part of the product engineering.   Not everyone knows that game elements provided by a service may not only be useless, but may also harm the learning process. There is a range of problems in gamification that are hidden or just ignored by many people. The most critical of those include: -    Game elements are not the same as the game itself. If you cross the thin red line, your learner may follow a mechanical game process and forget about the main purpose of the course - the learning. Even big companies face this issue, not to mention beginners in the industry. Moreover, it was specifically the wayward implementation of gamification by some software vendors that led to gamification not being taken seriously.  -    Gamification must not be a self-contained module. It has to be an enhancement of the main product functions, an auxiliary facility for making the learning process a bit more entertaining and engaging, but not for replacing it. -    It is not sufficient to simply add dozens of different badges, scores and levels. All these components must have vivid logic that makes sense to students. The process of getting the recognition and its further transformation into something else must be carefully designed and well-justified to users. -    Badges, rewards and any other distinct credentials should be limited in availability; otherwise, those will lose value for students. We tried to improve the gamification component several times using different approaches, but every time we crashed into one of the issues described above. Everything seemed just perfect in an SRS, but when applied to practice some implementations proved to be far-fetched, unnecessary and complicating the product. The gamification SRS was the most arguable document in the company. We completely rewrote it five times! Eventually, we found the golden mean and decided to start off with basic and yet useful functions that we expected to develop further using feedback from our customers.  Our main conclusion about gamification is that one shouldn’t completely pass control over it to a course author. Who knows the required skill set and competence level of employees better than their manager? So, we decided to grant a privilege of creating badges to Geenio users who have the role of Manager. All the manager needs to do is to set the rule that would reward a badge to a user after completing a learning plan. For example, if an employee successfully completes courses on PHP, MySQL and HTML with positive results, then the system will assign a badge "Web programming specialist" to such a user. Or give a badge "Thorough Learner" to a person who completed the largest number of courses among the department.  With that said, a the manager now becomes a part of the learning process too, and the main role of the manager is to set the goal of education. In turn, users can see the badges available and this helps to motivate them to perform bette. Moreover, the course author also has access to ramification elements and may reward students with a more or less prestigious prize depending on the results demonstrated. No one is missed; Everyone participates in the learning process. Cloud Solutions in E-Learning The cloud approach (SaaS) is still trending and these days it already dominates over the "traditional" on-premises software. Even such giants as SAP and Adobe participate in the great race of cloud solutions and they actively develop their own applications. Most experts predict the trend will remain unchanged and companies will continue moving to the cloud, because it’s easier, cheaper and requires less efforts from customers.  We evaluated available cloud solutions for e-learning and were impressed by the resulting picture. We were attracted immediately to the solutions and the overall experience was promising. However, once we tried to create a complete course, we faced many issues, such as unexpected behaviours or simply non-working controls. So, we understood that there is a demand for online course authoring software and new solutions of this kind are still required because existing apps cannot completely satisfy customers.  We decided not to reinvent the wheel or compete with such applications as Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline that were already the de-facto standard in the market, especially considering the existing market of SaaS education software. We, the Internet Generation, could not imagine another way to deliver our product because of the following reasons:  -    We needed a lightweight and fast service that is available from anywhere. -    With a broad audience to publish the course to, we didn’t want to worry about place or platform - it had to be a one-click action. -    We wanted to continue editing the course with a tablet, while sitting at the airport or on the train. -    We were attracted by the idea of collaboration within the software, with the author getting feedback right in the course and improving it on the fly.  All these concerns made the decision very simple - just provide the product via SaaS. As a result, we were able to address all the issues listed above and even more than that, we added some other functions that became possible. For example, we added a useful feature that allows you to insert a picture not only from your local computer, but also from the Internet using the Google Images service, right in your Geenio editor. The same thing with videos - why not drag and drop a Youtube file into your course you find it in the built-in search menu? One can hardly determine the real value of a trend unless the trend is applied in real life. And that is what we did while developing Geenio. Some trends turned out to be ineffective, and we rejected those without any regrets. Others proved to be so useful and natural that we wondered how those hadn’t become a standard in the industry. We want to advise our readers not to swear by new trends and test them out to going to production. Many trends are soap bubbles and if you cannot justify the use of a trendy and fancy feature, then you probably don’t really need it. At least it may not be completely applicable for your company and its business needs. Try and make your own decisions, and don’t be afraid to stand out from the crowd while defending your choices.  Remember that the goal of e-learning is still the same - help your students gain new knowledge.

Days leading up to Halloween 2014, a conference took place in fabulous Las Vegas called "DevLearn", the world’s biggest e-learning event produced by the eLearning Guild.  The Geenio team was on board for the conference as well as the expo for the third consecutive year and the second time as an exhibitor and a sponsor. It was an honor to participate in DevLearn to connect with the community and learn the newest trends and challenges of the industry. It was also a chance for us to talk to our customers directly and receive direct feedback firsthand. In addition, we offered a free trial account of Geenio to all attendees. "Full Cycle Learning Tool" - What does that exactly mean? This short phrase formulated for Geenio’s key target immediately raised questions for many visitors to our booth. But the answer is not hard to figure out: with Geenio you can implement online training within your company from scratch without requiring any other tools. Geenio allows you to create non-linear courses that adjust to a user experience right in your browser: These courses may have various multimedia pages or lessons to facilitate sharing author’s knowledge: Tests and questions are also the part of your course that help to control the results of knowledge transfer throughout the course:  The LMS part of Geenio provides the capabilities for transparent course assignments:  As a result, you can find an employee’s strengths and knowledge gaps and help your employees to achieve a level of competence and be successful in their jobs:    A demonstration of these capabilities convinced our visitors to go ahead and try the full Geenio version available at our website.  Dev Learn 2014 Results  With that said, we succeeded in our goal to introduce our product to a broad audience. Additionally -  as a bonus - we found several potential businesses and technology partners with the idea that we’d work together to help our customers be successful in the e-learning industry, whether or not they are Instructional Designers or SMEs.  Does what happen in Vegas stay in Vegas? OK, well, we broke the rules and remembered all those productive conversations and interesting interlocutors. And we’ll be back in 2015 with more features that our customers want.  But, you don’t need to wait till 2015 to check out our free trial version and watch the short video.  Kudos to Dev Learn 2014! See you soon!  

Not long ago Geenio LMS and Authoring Tool was updated. In the new version some very useful and important features were added. Some of the new features were requested by users and others were added just to make Geenio even better. Here is the short list of the changes. Check the details below. Created a Background Tool Introduced Color Schemes Added Typography Options Improved Page Connections Fixed Various Bugs Background Tool Adding backgrounds to course pages is a repetitive task when developing a course.  We understand that users want to save time on this routine process, and this is one of the reasons why we decided to create a new user-friendly tool for working with backgrounds. Now we have a special tool for backgrounds that allows users to add background images from their hard drive or from Google Image Search and automatically formats the image to fit the page. This tool also allows users to choose the color of the background from the color palette. Typography We have added an option to choose fonts for the texts on your pages. There are 16 beautiful fonts that can make your course look unique. The new typography feature allows you to see the changes before applying them to your course. Color Schemes Color Schemes is another new feature in our content authoring tools. Color schemes lets you choose a set of colors for the course that will apply to the pages. It’s very user-friendly and intuitive. Improved Page Connections We improved the interactions between course pages. Our team of developers made it so easy and aesthetic that there is no need to explain how it works. You just have to try. I think this is the best implementation of this feature I have ever seen in this kind of services. Take my money and give me three!   Fixed Various Bugs When you are adding and improving existing features as much as we were, you also get to fix a lot of things along the way. In the last few months we fixed various bugs. There is a lot in stability improvement and the new version will bring you a much more positive user experience than before. A lot of small but important things now work better and make us happy. Now, course authors can focus on content creation without wasting time on disturbing issues and bugs. The latest version of Geenio is available for a free trial on our web-site. If you have some ideas about how to improve our product or features that you desire to see in Geenio, feel free to contact us.

Learning path can be adjusted in three ways:The right or wrong answer to the questionSuccessful completion or failure of the testAdding interactive transmissions to the objects on the pageAll learning paths can be adjusted on the Pathboard screen. Below I will describe in detail how to create different learning paths for each of the ways.1. The right or wrong answer to the question     a. Add a new Question object to your course pathboard.     b. Write the question and choose the right answer.     c. Click on the created question on the pathboard and you will see two different colored icons.         d. Drag the correct and incorrect icons and drop them on the page where that student should go after answering the question.     e. Now it’s ready. You created two different paths for learners to take depending on their answers to specific questions in the course. .2. Successful completion or failure of the test     a. Add a new Test object to the pathboard.     b. Add a set of questions for your test and set the pass threshold in the test settings.     c. From here, just repeat steps C to E from the previous paragraph and enjoy the alternative learning paths in your course.3. Adding interactive transmissions to the objects on the pageThis way is little bit different from the previous two, but it is still easy and intuitive to understand.     a. Add a few objects on one of your pages. They can be images, texts or shapes.     b. Go to the pathboard of your course.     c. Click on the page you have created.     c. You will see a blue icon with a hand on it.     d. Drag this icon and drop it on one of the other existing pages.     e. You will be asked to choose one of the objects on the page. Clicking on the object will take the student to the predefined page. Please note that you can trigger only one action on each object. If you already defined an action on some object and want redefine it you will need first to remove the old connection from the object.     f. Click on the "Create" button and you will see a new connection between the object and the chosen page.

We just wanted to let you know that Geenio got a big update last week. We are always carefully gathering feedback to improve our product. This update included several bright ideas suggested by our users.New friendly design for account managementWe’ve improved the first page that you see after creating a Geenio account - the site management page. Now it’s really simple to take the next step to start using Geenio and to extend the limits of your subscription as you need.Simple Editing ModeWith the new simple editing mode you can start creating your course with even less effort than in the previous version. You can start authoring every new course with a clear linear structure, where all course components go one after another.When you need to go beyond the simple narrative mode, you can switch your course to the advanced mode in just one click and get all the capabilities of non-linear courses.The simple mode offers you Page, Lesson and Test as your course components, while the advanced mode also includes Question and feedback connections. Moreover, you can switch back and forth between these modes when the course has only linear elements.User and Group ManagementNow it is even easier to manage course assignments for users and groups. When you add a user to a group, all courses assigned to the group automatically become mandatory for the user.On the other hand, when you remove a user from a group, there is a choice whether to leave courses assigned to the user, or remove those that were pushed from the group assignments.More stability and user experience improvementsWe created a unified user interface and overall user experience in the Simple and Advanced modes. We improved user experience by editing text elements of the course in various browsers. In addition, we improved license configuration handling, implemented more than 300 other enhancements and fixed some other issues.Till we meet again!Geenio Team.

It is no big secret that most professionals, regardless of occupation, have a set of favorite tools that save them time and help them do their job better. A well-crafted toolbox saves you time, makes routine tasks easier, and helps you do your job with a smile. E-learning professionals are no different. Let me introduce five free Mac apps I cannot imagine doing without.I will not waste your time talking about Evernote or Dropbox - those are well-known and widely used. Instead, I would like to bring your attention to a few apps you may not have heard about, but that are no less useful, and can really help you out in your day-to-day tasks.SipWhen creating a course, having to strictly adhere to the customer’s design means you have to keep to the specified styles and measurements, and it is usually required that you use the provided color palette as well.In such situations, Sip is a life-saver. It enables you to pick colors from photos, pictures, web pages, or running applications with a single click. Just hover the cursor over the object, click left mouse button, and the HEX color code is saved to the clipboard, to be inserted in your course authoring tool. If HEX is unsuitable for you, choose among RGBA, HSL, HSLA, CMYK, or one of the many other formats the app supports. By default, Sip remembers the last five colors you picked. It also gives you its best guess at the names of picked colors.The app is free and takes up little disk space. A paid upgrade to the professional version is available, bringing with it a number of additional features. The ones I found to be the most useful are the ability to automatically create a palette complementing a color of your choice, and to edit the selected colors right from the quick access panel in the Mac menu bar .Sip could be very useful for case scenario when the client showing you an image they found somewhere on the Internet and asking to "just make it look like this".http://theolabrothers.com/PixelPerfectOkay, we have got the colors covered. However, when using a mockup provided by the client, getting the measurements right is every bit as important. This is where PixelPerfect comes to the rescue. It gives you the ability to make a mockup semitransparent and overlay it upon the image produced by a different application - for example, your course authoring tool. This makes it really easy to notice even minor differences between what you have got so far and what your client or boss want to see. When adhering to the mockup is essential, PixelPerfect becomes an indispensable tool.https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixel-perfect/id916097243?mt=12LigthshotNo course is complete without images. Besides the purely illustrative pictures meant to set the tone for the course, it is often necessary to add screenshots with the requisite callouts. For example, there is no getting around it if your course teaches the use of a software product. Now, there are literally hundreds of apps out there that make screenshots, but I recommend Lightshot, for a number of reasons. First, it is free. Second, there is both a Mac and PC version. Third, unlike many of its counterparts, it does not attempt to make screenshots, capture video, and brew you a mean cuppa tea, all at once. It knows exactly what it sets out to do, and its minimalism is admirable. And finally, Lightshot gives you the ability to add callouts to the screenshot without the need to use an image editor - very handy.If this was not enough, Lightshot also enables you to share your screenshots with a single click. Alternatively, you can upload them to the Lightshot cloud by logging in with your Google or Facebook account - this will also let you access your screenshots from any computer. All in all, Lightshot is a fantastic little piece of software that I cannot recommend enough. I will let you in on a little secret - for me it replaced a different screenshot-making tool I had happily used for seven years prior to trying Lightshot, and that is saying something.https://app.prntscr.comRecorditWhen you are trying to explain a particularly tricky concept or scenario, a single screenshot might not get the job done. You are presented with the ugly choice of either stringing together four or five of those, complete with the requisite callouts and explanations, or, figuratively speaking, calling in the artillery and making a video. However, both options fail miserably when you need to provide instructions at a moment’s notice and send them by email. This is where Recordit shines.Do you remember GIFs? Animated images from the dawn of the Internet that nobody could agree on how to pronounce correctly? Yeah, the Imgur people are still obsessed with them. More to the point, Recordit operates on a similar principle. It captures a portion of the screen, including the movements of the mouse cursor and any clicks you make, and makes a .gif image file out of it. The resulting image is uploaded to the Internet, and you are given a link to access it. That is all Recordit does. One trick pony? Sure, but the one trick it does, it does ever so well. Click a button, select the portion of the screen to capture, start recording, done. Simple as that.You can see Recordit as a pared down screen capture or video editing tool, one that produces not courses, but .gifs. On the upside, it is completely free. It is a real life-saver when you need to quickly demonstrate something to a client or a colleague. Because the resulting screencast is a .gif and not a video, it is much easier to send it in an email. GIFs take little disk space and require neither the Flash plugin nor a video player or codecs for playback.Recordit comes in especially handy when you need to quickly demonstrate an issue that the other party cannot reproduce on their side. But enough with the talking. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is one to let Recordit show off its chops:LittleIpsumWhen the burden of creating a mockup for the course rests upon your shoulders, you are usually required to show the client the work in progress every now and then. Until the course is ready, there is usually no content, so text blocks are filled with nonsense text - most usually Lorem Ipsum. LittleIpsum is a handy little program that generates its namesake on demand, saving you the trouble of visiting websites of similar function. It can generate the requisite number of words, lines, or paragraphs of text and save them to the clipboard - all it takes is literally two clicks of the mouse. Like all the other programs presented here, LittleIpsum is lightweight and free, as well as convenient and easy to use.http://littleipsum.com/

Great news everyone! Last week we published a new Geenio release. We delivered a number of improvements to the look and feel of the product, as well as implemented new functionality we are sure you all will love. Curious about the details? Read on!Hybrid Courses With SCORM SupportThe ability to create hybrid courses is the most important feature added in this release. We received a lot of feedback requesting the ability to import courses created with the help of other authoring tools. The importance of this feature for those who had dozens - or hundreds - of courses already created in a variety of other course building applications was fully understood. Well, you asked and we delivered.In fact, we decided to do you one better. Besides merely importing SCORM-based courses, Geenio now enables you to add new learning objects to those courses with the help of our authoring tool. In other words, you you can now import an existing course to Geenio, and then expand it by adding pages, lessons, or tests, thus creating a hybrid course, consisting of both SCORM packages and Geenio objects. Enjoy!Statistics ExpandedWe added a summary page at the end of every test. When a user completes a test, they are shown their result, as well as the number of errors they made, the date they took the test, and how much time they spent on it. They can also see the list of all answers they provided, with each one marked as either correct or false. This information is available independently for every attempt the user makes, enabling them to accurately track their progress.In addition, we implemented global site statistics. Those provide such information as the number of published courses for a given period and the number of created users, as well as data pertaining to their levels of activity within the system and average test result values.Course CopyingSimplifying workflows to save your time is one of our top priorities, and with that in mind, we added the ability to copy existing courses in Geenio update 1.3. This functionality saves you time by enabling you to simply copy an existing course and make changes to it instead of building a new one from scratch.New Course Management OptionsWe added a handy navigation tool letting the user go to any page of the course they have already seen. We also implemented the ability to limit the time allowed for completing a course - whenever a course is assigned to a user, you can set a due date, by which the course must be completed. If the course is not completed by the due date, the user can no longer take it.Authoring Tool ImprovementsNeedless to say, we could not have rolled out the update without a few tweaks to our indispensable authoring tool. Our developers improved working with text and headers, and fixed many bugs that got in the way of the creative process of making courses. We also reviewed and expanded the list of possible font sizes. But the most pleasant surprise, no doubt, is the newly introduced ability to align different objects with each other, as well as aligning objects to grid. We know that you want your courses to look nice and orderly, and this new functionality enables you to make sure every object is in its place quickly and easily. Give ‘er a try - we are sure you will love it.Despite the number of improvements we have delivered in this update, here at Geenio we never stop innovating. You can look forward to many new and exciting features in the future. Is there anything in particular you would like to see implemented in Geenio? Let us know, and we will be happy to discuss it with you.All the best, and stay tuned. :)The Geenio team

I have been a blogger now for a few years and although I go through phases of inactivity on the whole I think blogging has become an important and fundamental part of my practice. I was prompted to begin in part because I realised I didn’t really understand blogging as a practice and wanted to explore whether or not it could be of value for me. To be honest I was pretty sceptical but once I started was amazed at how valuable I found it. For me blogging performs a number of functions: It acts as a reflective outlet, helps me develop and articulate ideas, in a fairly informal and quick fashion It acts as a repository of my ideas and resources It provides a mechanism for promoting project work and the work of others I respect in the community It enables me to be part of the wider network, to connect with other researchers. This link lists some of my previous musing on the topic. Twitter has changed how I blog and how frequently, but it hasn’t replaced it. I, like others (see the twitter vs. blogging flash debate), think the two are complementary. For me Cloudworks is increasingly becoming a third dimension = as a means of collective live blogging, discussion and aggregation of resources around a particular topic or theme. But then I guess I would say that wouldn’t I!