Remco Ploeg posted some great news to the Education Special Interest Group on the SUGUK web site announcing the release of the Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS).  You can register and download the community edition from:

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/tools/lcds/default.mspx

This is great news as one of the real pain points of the SLK/MLG platform, since the move from Class Server, has been the lack of any decent content editors that can deliver content that conforms to the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 1.2, which can be hosted in SharePoint document libraries and used by the SharePoint Learning Kit. 

During the installation you will note that this is the Community Edition, I don’t have any information on if there is a plan to release any commercial at this time.

LCDS Author

LCDS works with Courses, modules, lessons and topics with each course being a separate project.  Clicking on New prompts you to enter details for the Course.

Note:  If you are running on Vista you need to Run ad Administrator or you will get a script error after clicking OK.

My First Course

Your course will be created with a module, lesson and four topics providing you with a basic structure, you can add new items and reorder the exiting ones using the Course Structure toolbar.

Selecting the Introduction topic allows you to select the template associated with this topic, we will choose the Read and Introduction.

Each template has a predefined Page designer with areas to enter relevant information.  I plan to cover some of the other Template types in future posts.

We will enter some basic information for My First Course.

Adding a picture seems a little awkward as I click on the browse button and look at my Pictures directory for the picture to upload, on clicking OK I get an error saying ‘You must select a file from the ‘media’ folder. It would be nice if the program would copy this in for me – i’ll do this by clicking Media Folder in the top tool bar and manually copying the file, this raises another design issue – why are my courses not stored in My Documents?  In Vista I need administrator rights to copy files to the Program Files directory…

Adding the picture (don’t worry about it looking squashed it will be ok) a heading, some introductory text and objectives.

At this point I recommend you preview the course using the button on the top toolbar.

(If you get a warning about ActiveX controls right click and allow).

Already things look pretty good   

However, more work needed

What I did find whilst working with the templates like the Sort Game was difficulty in previewing the contents.  The tools look very user friendly but I found in my Vista environment that I could not test all of them.

So Microsoft have made significant progress to providing us with a SCORM editor,  although if you are using Vista you may experience some of the difficulties I have noted above.

I recommend you download the tools and have a play for yourself, the UI is very well laid out and appear easy to use.  I just need to resolve some of the preview issues before i can really test it out fully.

I am very interested in your experiences and would welcome posts to this thread on SUGUK web site so that we can share this knowledge and experiences, if you blog about it please add a link so it’s easy for others to find you post.