Toolkit: Ready? Go! The ReadyGo Authoring Tool

The ReadyGo authoring tool is one of those that seem toalways be just under the radar of most eLearning developers. Let’s end thatnow.

The big picture

The ReadyGo Web Course Builder is a rather intuitive tool,simple enough to learn, but with thoughtful instructional design conceptsunderlying it all. The end result is HTML.

Courses that you create can have up to four levels:

1. Course
2. Chapter
3. Page
4. Subpage

You can choose to have fewer levels, of course; you can haveas few as one, in fact. When you create a new course, you enter some basicinformation (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Course Properties dialog

From the same dialog, you can also make decisions regardingthe appearance of everything (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Course Properties Appearance options

Getting down to details

These seemingly innocent options lead to a huge variety ofcustomization choices. For instance, when you choose the Labels and Text option from the Appearance dropdown, the number ofchoices becomes quite large (see Figure 3, which only shows one-fifth of them).

Figure 3: The Labels and Text options

The Services dropdown gives you the chance to set upfrequently asked questions, a glossary, and contacts. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: The Course Properties Services options

This sets the course up with one chapter. Double-clicking achapter lets you set a number of options for that chapter, including its title.One nice advantage of this approach is that you can preplan your course structurein advance, much as you would create an outline before writing a book. Figure 5shows a new course with three chapters.

Figure 5: A new course with three chapters

Within each chapter, you next create pages. A page comprisesa series of items, which you can order any way you like. The items can be a mixof text, images, audio, and video elements. The items, called bullets, eachhave a dialog that lets you define what you would like to include for thatbullet; Figure 6 shows you the possibilities. You can have up to 30 bullets oneach page. I believe the term bulletis a bit misleading, because a bullet is nothing like a bullet in a Wordoutline or in PowerPoint. Bullets are really containers that can hold anythingyou see listed in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Media choices to include in a bullet

You can add one or more of the icons you see in Figure 7 toany page.

Figure 7: Add one or more of these icons to any page

Explanation of the icons:

1. ATell Me More page links to anin-depth article that you provide on the course subject.
2. Try This leads to interactive featuresabout the subject matter.
3. Quiz links to quiz questions that youcreate. I’ll discuss quizzes in a bit.
4. Step-by-step offers learners a visual guideto how to use the tools. You can have up to 20 steps in each Step-by-stepguide.
5. Net Links gives the learner links torelated websites.
6. Test/Survey leads learners to tests onthe material.

In addition, you can also have:

1. A Tip, which is a note that you maywant to give learners.
2. It’s True, a separate text item thatfocuses on an important fact.
3. Sub-pages, letting the learner digdeeper in the page.

As you have a wide variety of elements that you can add to apage, as seen above, you can create truly media-rich and interesting courseswith instructionally sound choices you can give learners all along the way.

What about interactivity?

Quizzingand testing

ReadyGo offers a lot of diversity in the area ofassessments.

1. Self-assessments
2. Exercises,which are not saved or graded
3. Quizzes,which saves a learner’s answers
4. Tests,in which both answers and scores are saved

The software supports many different question types. See thelist in Figure 8.

Figure 8: ReadyGo question types

ReadyGo does not force you to separate each question byputting them on separate pages. In fact, you can have up to 100 questions on apage, which makes quizzes and tests like those you had in school. This usually makesmore sense pedagogically, as it lets learners answer questions in the orderthat they prefer rather than forcing them into a certain order. There is nolimit to the number of test pages you can create. As they are HTML-based, theywill work on mobile devices as well as in all browsers.

You can create question pools in ReadyGo so that you canchoose to deliver a number of questions from different pools. In addition, youcan base branching on the score the learner received, and, if you wish, you canrequire the learner to pass the test in order to proceed.

There are even more features regarding tests and surveys.You can:

1. Weighteach question, providing it a different number of points.
2. Settests to be optional or mandatory.
3. Providea certificate based on the percentage or grade the learner received.
4. Providefeedback at the question level and also for each separate answer.
5. Limitthe amount of time a learner can spend on a test page.
6. AddSCORM test questions not created in ReadyGo.

Tracking learner progress

One of ReadyGo’s greatest strengths is its ability to talkto almost any progress-tracking system.

1. You can decide not to store the results but to show the learner his or her testresults during the browser session.
2. In addition, ReadyGo has over 60 proven and unique LMS implementations, more thanany other tool I’ve seen. We all know how SCORM and AICC can vary somewhat fromone LMS to another. ReadyGo solves the problem by ensuring that all of the mostcommon implementations work right out of the box, including straight-up SCORMand AICC connections.
3. If you have a progress-tracking system that isn’t supported out of the box,ReadyGo is committed to making sure they provide you a working solution. Thatis how they have built all of the current LMS implementations.

More features I like

1. ReadyGo automatically saves your work every 20 minutes.
2. One of the publishing options lets you print your course to a printer or PDF todistribute to learners.
3. When publishing, you can automatically upload files to an FTP site so you can testyour course online right away.
4. ReadyGo gives you access to a number of ready-made templates if you wish to make use ofthem, including templates for smartphones. For a price, you can also have themcreate new templates for you.

Limitations of ReadyGo

As with every tool, it’s important to keep in mind thelimitations inherent in ReadyGo.

1. ReadyGoruns in Windows only. There is no Mac version of the tool. Of course, anycourses you create can run on every computer and on most mobile devices.
2. ReadyGocontains a lot of good interactive questions you can include in your course,but it isn’t a free-form environment in which you can, for instance, placeitems on a stage and assemble them in a fixed form. This is both good and bad,depending on how you look at it.

The bottom line

ReadyGo costs $499 per developer and allows you to create anunlimited number of courses. There are no per-learner license fees.