The L & D world is full of course authoring solutions. Most are locally installed on your computer and a growing number of them are now cloud based solutions. If you are new to the Edtech industry or a bit tech averse, it can be hard to make the right decision about the right solution for you and/or your organization. Do yo want to be able to collaborate with team members? Your org is keen on doing video and you need a place to host them? Are you having problems keeping your assets stored in a centralized location? These are some of the questions you will need to answer if you are a business leader or your boss is asking for your input as a learning expert. iSpring is one of the major players in the industry that has been around for 20 plus years. Recently, they have reinforced their iSpring Suite MAX suite of eLearning solutions with a collaboration platform known as iSpring Space. Watch the clip below if you want to learn about the whole set of solutions. Otherwise, let’s break down how iSpring Space answers intro questions and how it can meet your authoring needs.
What can iSpring Space do?
The name is very apt. iSpring Space is a collaboration space in the cloud. It primarily serves three purposes: Store stuff, share/host stuff and author responsive courses. The ability for visitors to review your content and comment on courses is an added bonus. Check out the 12-minute video below if you want to see it in action. If not, let’s move on down and learn more about its storing capability. Oh, by the way, it would really be grand if you would sub to my channel.
Storing Content
Choosing where and how to store content is a decision every learning professional needs to think about. Traditionally, local network drives have been the solution or even cloud based drives like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. So, why even have a conversation about using iSpring Space instead of these methods? Well, in today’s world of much needed collaboration, local networks are an antiquated approach. Also, as of today, you can use cloud based drives to store content but not host and share it. For example, you can share files but those services were not created to stream video. iSpring Space uses the power of iSpring cloud servers to store and host your content in one place.
Hosting Advantages
Let’s say you have a video that is part of one of your courses. However, that video can also be a stand alone microlearning item or be part of another course you are designing. If you store it in iSpring Space you can also share its link or embedded across multiple courses or endpoints. If you think about it, this is better than the alternative of having multiple files of the same video used in various places. What happens if you need to edit or change it? You would have replace it in however many places you have used it. Of course, video hosting is not a new concept. You can use services like YouTube or Vimeo but the former is not as secure and the latter comes with an additional price tag aka not free.
Responsive Course Authoring
In addition to storage and hosting, iSpring Space is also a responsive authoring tool which means your course will provide a consistent experience on any viewing device. The authoring is very friendly and similar to creating web pages. iSpring uses a multimedia rich editor with multiple formatting options and you can embed or directly upload videos and images. Text can be formatted in various styles and simultaneous edits can happen if you choose to collaborate live with a teammate.
Wrap Up
I think in summary, iSpring is providing some features other vendors have not thought of yet. The keyword here is “yet” because as we know, this is the best time to be an instructional designer due to all the improvements vendors are adding to maintain a competitive edge. For now, iSpring Space is a solid answer to complement the already vast features of the iSpring authoring suite of products.
