Moodle in English: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

Much to my excitement I found a tool called WalkMe today which offers a guided overlay tour of any website. You can build tours which will interactively step you through a process on a site, with very helpful bubbles guiding you along the way. This was going to solve all of our Moodle-support needs, surely!?

How naive of me to think this was anything other than an expensive wish. The WalkMe product is probably the strongest on the market, aka fantastic, but also so is the price-tag (hundreds to thousands of USD per month) and raising millions in funding. Considering education isn't loaded with finances, and we're all open source and/or not rich, I wondered what alternatives there were. I've discovered a few services that are either cheaper, free or pricey, just to compare:

Inline Manual- $$
JoyRide - O/S
WalkMe - $$$
Taurus - $

So, I guess what I'm wondering is whether there's much call for this kind of thing. Could it be built into Moodle? I would imagine if an open source version existed, and was incorporated into the system, then we can enjoy a write-once, enjoy-many return. Web tours seem to (for me) have sprung up overnight. I've always been cautious about creating screen-casts of websites, they are isolated from the system you need to perform the function in (not everyone has dual screens), they go out of date, are hard to record cleanly and often have terrible wobble-mouse effects. Guided feature tour seem like a strong contender for navigating through the sea of confusion.

Thoughts?

Average of ratings: Cool (1)

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Jez H - Saturday, 12 October 2013, 6:22 AM

The problem with this kind of thing is that by the time you have set it all up its out of date, just like screencasts.

Our approach is to identify the most common problems and make short screencasts on those.

Ultimately I dont think there is any substitute for decent training.

Whilst on the subject of screencasts I found Pact had a video course on Moodle for $9

http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-elearning-course-development/video

I had not realised they had started using video.

Average of ratings: Cool (1)

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Frankie Kam - Saturday, 12 October 2013, 12:05 PM

Hi Matt

You were excited upon discovering guided tours? So was I!
This post is the best comparison of walkme tools/alternatives I can find.
http://blog.kera.io/post/42951938895/top-walkme-alternatives-compared-and-visualised

If you are new to Product Tour products, this graph is worth a thousand words. It is, in my mind,
a most excellent and succint overview of product tour software available (as of October 2013):

Yo wassup, wassup? Frankie da Man is in the 'hood.

Can you imagine what an Open Source tool like that would do for Moodle end-user support? If the screen walkthrough or tours are organised well, and are easy to setup, why, that would almost act as a no-brainer/autopilot system for the end user. Everything is shown on screen live. Videos are still useful and hands-on training very effective, but there is nothing like having a virtual tutor 'sitting right next to you' to guide your through step 4 of 11 to complete a complicated procedure. Remember Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity? She pulled out the Green Manual (it was in Russian!) and had to flip this switch and that to get the space module working. Pretty complicated maneuvers. Even astronauts in space could do with a helping hand from a product tour, me thinks!

Yes, like you, I did also wonder if there were such a tool for Moodle. And there is! It is the Page Hints module invented by the Isreali Moodle boffin, Nadav Kavalerchik. He blogged about it on his blog Moodlemagic which I can't access now@!?? http://moodlemagic.com/moodle. I've tried it out on my Moodle 2.5 site. In my humblest of opinions, it's a good effort, but it should be designed to be easy to use by non-IT moodle users. What I mean to say is setting up a tour (e.g., where to place the popup windows with coordinates and such) with Nadav's tool can be done but it is tedious even for power IT-users. However, it's FREE compared to the (especially) WalkMe and other alternatives! Since I couldn't access his Github site for Page Hints, I've attached the Page Hints module zip file here with this post. Install the files and subfolders inside http://www.yourMoodlesite/moodle/local/page_hints.

Enjoy. Maybe the Moodle community, together with Nadav's genius mind, my indomitable Tigger-like enthusiasm, your intrepid serendipity, and Moodle users' $$$, can create a user-friendly and viable alternative to the commercial versions of this Walkme/Walkabout/Screen tour/ tool. Watch this space.

Regards
Frankie Kam
http://moodurian.blogspot.com
I Wouldn't Have Nothing If I Didn't Have Moodle with a cuppa cha and a slice of durian cake for me afternoon tea.

page_hints.zip

Average of ratings: Very cool (4)

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Guido Hornig - Saturday, 21 February 2015, 9:32 PM

Some github links:

https://github.com/markward/page_hints

and a Website:

http://moodlemark.com/?p=5#comments

Average of ratings: -

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Frankie Kam - Monday, 13 April 2015, 12:54 PM

This looks pretty interesting. Has anyone used this type of tool on their Moodle site before? Any benefits that were immediately apparent or realised?

and

Average of ratings: -

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Blair F. - Friday, 11 September 2015, 11:49 PM

Frankie, have you done any further research into inlinemanual? It DOES look interesting and seems fairly affordable.

Average of ratings: -

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Frankie Kam - Tuesday, 15 September 2015, 12:11 AM

Hi Blair. Thanks for the reminder. I have to get down to do it. Must. Research. Must. Blog.

Average of ratings: -

Re: Guided Feature Tours (WalkMe, Inline Manual, Joyride, etc)

by Gokul Suresh - Thursday, 21 April 2016, 4:41 PM

I am glad that I bumped into this question. Not because, I know a solution for all this pandemonium, but because I've got another great idea for a blog post from this. So, thanks guys

Now for the solution, I think you should definitely give Whatfix a try. Whatfix is also an interactive walkthrough creating platform, that works seamlessly on Moodle, just like WalkMe. (In fact, it's one of the direct competitors to WalkMe)

Now what makes it different and more useful is:

1. Whatfix is SCORM compliant - You can directly create courses with Whatfix and upload them to moodle. And it also records the course progress. (The video below explains how)

2. Creation, editing, and publishing guided walkthroughs with Whatfix is quick and easy on any web platforms.

3. Once a Whatfix walkthrough (known as flow) is created, it is autogenerated into multiple formats like Slideshow, annotated Video with mouse movements, screenshots/article, and PDF. From each of these formats, you can directly jump to the live walkthrough by clicking the button called See Live.

4. Whatfix has a community version for individuals, smaller companies, and an Enterprise version for others, which has a tailor-made pricing package. (And yes, it way cheaper than WalkMe)

5. Whatfix's quick and easy editing, helps thwart the outdated walkthrough problem as well. When in an Enterprise package, the user with Whatfix login can quickly access the walkthrough and edit them. (It takes less than minutes) And voila, the walkthrough is good as new.

In a nutshell, all these things makes Whatfix a great add-on for Moodle, or any eLearning website for that matter.

Here's a video that shows Whatfix's SCORM compliancy on Moodle: