With more people now learning from home, it's more important than ever to keep good communication between teaching staff and students. Whether your college or uni offers online distance learning courses, or if students need to study from home to support full-time employment, they deserve the same interactivity with the learning materials as others.

So how do you deliver all your engaging, informative presentations and tutorials from the classroom to people who aren't onsite? Virtual classrooms are online learning environments which let tutors deliver course content through the web. Students can then view the content at a time which suits them, ensuring they don't miss out on valuable teaching time.

Creating the actual course material needn't be daunting, either. There are now packages which make creating an interactive tutorial with videos, Flash animations, quizzes and more, almost as simple as producing a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Adobe's eLearning Suite 2.5 contains well-known Adobe design tools like Photoshop and Flash Builder, and combines them with applications that are designed specifically to deliver web learning content.

Below, we take a look at how eLearning Suite can help staff create content for the virtual classroom, from putting together content to delivering it and evaluating performance...

Creating your tutorial

It could be difficult to get students to retain information over the course of a long tutorial when they're not actually in class. But with Adobe Captivate, it's easy to quickly add engaging content to a slideshow by importing video to spread across different slides, and recording and editing a voiceover in the Audition app to put over the top. Presenter 7 also allows students to give feedback on the tutorial without having to be in the classroom, with ready-made quiz templates and surveys for more interactive learning. While tutors could just record a webcast of themselves giving a lecture, it's very unlikely that students would stay as engaged as they would with a more interactive, participatory online learning session.

Having apps that integrate well with each other and are designed to be intuitive makes the whole creation process more streamlined and doesn't cut into time needed for other jobs. For example, building master slides in Captivate gives tutors ready-made templates to drop content into, so they don't have to constantly design new slides one by one. And integration with professional design apps like Photoshop and Flash Professional makes it easy to take an image or animation and import it into the Captivate presentation as a 'smart object', so any changes made to it are also made to the original file simultaneously.

Delivering and receiving content

To make sure the content can be downloaded and viewed by as many students at home as possible, presentations have to be compatible with numerous systems. Adobe publishes to pretty much any format, ready for any platform, and it only takes one click to publish content to YouTube so it can be viewed from anywhere in the world.

Tutors can also get instant feedback and generate discussions with students by streaming the presentation live on the web. The additional Adobe Connect web conferencing app allows tutors to pause parts of the presentation, answer questions and receive questions either typed into the comments box on the interface.

So students never miss out on course materials when they're away from their desk, presentations can be exported to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Device Central shows how presentations will look, then they can be exported for students to download to their devices to take away with them.

Evaluating performance

Tutors can evaluate students' performance by capturing scoring data from all the interactive elements of their presentations, including any quizzes, click boxes, text entry boxes and buttons, then track and report key performance metrics, like average score and pass or fail. This can also help show tutors which areas of the content could be improved upon to provide a better learning experience. If your institution uses its own Learning Management System, like Blackboard, scoring data can also be exported in a SCORM- and AICC-compliant format to use within it.

eLearning Suite at St John the Baptist School

St John the Baptist School in Surrey has started using Adobe eLearning Suite for developing rich eLearning course materials. Advanced skills teacher Renaldo Lawrence explained to Adobe how they've been getting on. "The integration among the Adobe eLearning Suite tools is amazing," said Lawrence. "I can work in four or five different Adobe eLearning Suite applications at once and it feels like one. The seamless integration and consistency among applications allows me to be extremely efficient and creative."

Adobe Captivate in particular provides Lawrence with the expressive design features for delivering powerful eLearning materials. The ICT team uses video extensively in its tutorials, for more than just showing a teacher lecturing the students. "Adobe Captivate gives us the flexibility to create more stimulating and even interactive courses using videos," he said. "Students accessing an online tutorial have more options than simply watching the video, like clicking on menus to display relevant slides on the fly and jumping around the video."

To find out more about Adobe's eLearning Suite 2.5, call us on 03332 409 300 or email learning@Jigsaw24.com.

Tags: Adobe , eLearning Suite