Hi everyone,
does anybody know Force Ten (http://www.eedo.com/products/forceten.html) or has anybody experience with this product?
Best regards,
Timo
I know people who work there. The Montreal office is staffed with graduates from Concordia University's programs in educational technology. They are very professional and highly trained in learning and performance (they aren't just programmers who don't have a clue about learning needs).
Ray, thanks for your reply.
However, I am not clear about one aspect of their product - I was told that Force Ten is an authoring tool, whereas the company's website describes it as an LMS, which are two different pairs of shoes. So, what kind of application is it?
Thanks for your answers,
Timo
However, I am not clear about one aspect of their product - I was told that Force Ten is an authoring tool, whereas the company's website describes it as an LMS, which are two different pairs of shoes. So, what kind of application is it?
Thanks for your answers,
Timo
It is billed as a Learning Content Management System. This makes it a hybrid content management system (CMS) and learning management system (LMS). I would assume that authoring support is built into the CMS in a way similar to Moodle.
Keep in mind I have only a very limited understanding of this product, so if anyone else would like to take a go at clarifying exactly what ForceTen does...please chime in!
Keep in mind I have only a very limited understanding of this product, so if anyone else would like to take a go at clarifying exactly what ForceTen does...please chime in!
As per your note, Forceten is an LCMS - i.e. it manages the processes around learning content creation, delivery and maintenance (rather than an LMS which manages the processes around learners and learning events). These concepts do not have a direct correlation with VLE/MLE used in an academic environment. Forceten has mainly been used in corporates for collaborative e-learning authoring, but this has shifted to also rendering content for multiple outputs, e.g. e-learning, mobile, printed form etc.
Hope that's helpful. DAVID
Dave, thanks for your reply.
If I understood you correctly, than Force Ten is in principle a learning tool that has a similar or comparable purpose as Moodle has - i.e. managing learning content in different formats and organizing and making them available to learners in a virtual-classroom-like style. And in addition to this, Force Ten also includes an authoring tool (like Moodle also has), but in contrast to Moodle, Force Ten provides a wider variety to export this content in various formats and for different media.
Did I assume correctly?
Thanks,
Timo
If I understood you correctly, than Force Ten is in principle a learning tool that has a similar or comparable purpose as Moodle has - i.e. managing learning content in different formats and organizing and making them available to learners in a virtual-classroom-like style. And in addition to this, Force Ten also includes an authoring tool (like Moodle also has), but in contrast to Moodle, Force Ten provides a wider variety to export this content in various formats and for different media.
Did I assume correctly?
Thanks,
Timo
Hi
You can author courses in this LCMS as well as publish them in a variety of formats. Flash, graphic, text, audio, video etc assets can be used and reused in these courses.
There are certification courses available with EEDO. I got certified.
Sanjay K Singh
You can author courses in this LCMS as well as publish them in a variety of formats. Flash, graphic, text, audio, video etc assets can be used and reused in these courses.
There are certification courses available with EEDO. I got certified.
Sanjay K Singh
We had several employees here get certified also. From what they've said the tools and methods it uses are archaic at best. Authoring in it is very slow and cumbersome. The results were not at all up to the customers’ expectations, but we were told to use it anyway because they paid so much for it. (Somebody made a quick sell there.) After all was said and done it was just faster and better to completely develop and contain all the training in a flash shell, and dump it into force10.
We create multi-media, interactive online courses and one of our customers recently implemented ForceTen as their standard LCMS. We are not building the content native in ForceTen, we use other "industry standard" type popular tools. Our customer was led to believe that ForceTen would function like a regular LMS where courses are easy to import, not the case. They are having a difficult time adding our courses to the system. It appears to me that ForceTen MUCH prefers you build simple courses within it's authoring tool.
Hello,
I am an experienced developer and I am obliged to work with F10.
Personally it is the worst tool for authoring if you know how to develop and you would like a nice customized result.
It is ok for basic templates and navigation and it wraps SCORM perfectly.
Buggy, slow with a stupid search engine that i.e. in object search, if you dont remember the EXACT name you gave to it, you get no results.
For me it's the worst crap I have ever worked with. Sure in theory everything is fine.
Let's take an example. You want to create a template. You have predefined sizes that take BY DEFAULT that you will have a 60px.navigation. This cannot be changed. You need to do a lot of work around to create a template without this 60px.
Then you want to add your objects...
You go to the menu. You choose your i.e. graphic. You give a title, a description and you add it in your page.
You want to align it with another? I hope you have good eyes.
There is no alignment there. Unless you do it in phothoshop, note down the X and Ys, double click the object wait for the popup to appear and paste the x and y values. Dont forget to click on the button setposition, otherwise you will need to repeat the step.
Then you have a second graphic object that you need to send to back.
Again, you double click, popup, dialog box, send to back.
You add other graphics, and by mistake, you click on that... oups! it came in front of everything else.... now imagine that you have a complex layout where graphics are close one to the other....
Try to use the arrows for fine tuning... oups! I forgot THEY ARE NOT WORKING... after asking the Outstart support (because the documentation sucks) they told us...that they have a more intuitive way to do that work... U=up, D=down, L=left, R= right. No way to move by 10 pixels...
Finally you place your graphics.
You would like to add text right? ))))))))
You cannot choose a color for your text unless you have predefined it and added it in the color list (that is somewhere outside the page you are working. DONT LEAVE THE PAGE... you loose it)
Anyway, you added your text.
You want to edit it....
Piece of cake! Just double click your text, popup opens, click on object button and then, you can edit your text.
What will happen if you create a template and you specify a text box size?
If you write less text it is ok (it is not automatically adjustable) but if you have more text... good luck
Then you save your template.
Wait, do you remember the name you gave to the page?
because as soon as you click on save... pouff the page is gone. You need to SEARCH for it, locate it again and continue the editing.
Would you like to save your work often?.... well think twice and pray that F10 it will not freeze.
I will tell it simply, my co-developer quited because we are forced to use force 10 and I am currently trying to leave...
I hope that helped... but if you want more information I am pleased to offer it to you
You are correct that ForceTen is not the best design tool. Yet you apparently did not have the proper instruction prior to using the tool.
Though you may question at times how did I get here or do that, the more you use the tool the better it gets. We integrate many authoring tool products within ForceTen courses. You can even use full Flash courses, Articulate, or Brainshark. The key in ForceTen is using naming conventions for what you produce. There are close to a hundred criteria to search for content including name, id, type of content, etc. One advantage of the ForceTen authoring system is the Structure builder. You can create courses, clusters, pages or content and move around in sequence as required.
Regarding editing and formatting content on a course page. You checkout the page and then the content. On the edit page display you can double-click any item and postion by pixel. You can change the font, size, and color on same screen. You can turn on a grid on the page, you set the size in px, and drag the content to the proper location.
ForceTen like many tools as more features than you will ever learn. I always learn a system by trying to do what I know it should do and then move on to the next challenge.