BP4- Udutu

Currently I work for the University of Minnesota in the Office of Classroom Management Support Department. My official title is Customer Service Specialist; I work in one of the smallest call centers probably ever since there are only two of us. We function as the one stop to report all General Purpose Classroom issues on campus, however our main focus is assisting instructors with technology and any issues they may experience with it in the classroom. One area we are always trying to improve upon in my department is the online resources we provide for our classroom users. With this in mind for this assignment I used Udutu (www.udutu.com), which is an online course authoring tool. 

Udutu is a pretty intuitive tool. While there are extensive tutorials available (not only on how to use the software, but also on good lesson design.) I was able to start building a knitting tutorial without consulting them too much. It is very similar to IWeb in the sense that you need to know nothing about coding to build your lesson. You simply need to know how to upload a file to the Internet. My sister the web designer would call it a WYSIWYG, which stands for what you see is what you get.

A screen shot of the Udutu dashboard

The main problem with WYSIWYG editing programs is that while they are easy to use, your choices are limited. For example in my lesson I wanted to include a link to the knitting pattern that I wrote a tutorial for however when I added the link it changed the size of the font so that it was much smaller than the rest of the lessons text and there was no way to fix it. Also there is no way to move your media around, which is a bit frustrating.

Once you finish building your lesson you have three choices for distribution you can publish your course and host it on the Udutu.com web server, this can cost anywhere from $19.95 a month to $199.95 a month depending on what your needs as a company are. You can extract the course from Udutu and download it to your computer, and distribute it yourself, this option is free, or you can publish your lesson on Facebook, which is also a free option. This is where I feel Udutu is lacking as a tool, because I was unable to find resources that explained how to distribute my lesson via the Internet once I had extracted it.  So, I ended up distributing my lesson via Facebook, the one problem I found with this distribution method is that I am unable to share the lesson with people outside of Facebook.  I think allowing course creators to distribute via Facebook is a step in the right direction, event though Facebook is not widely accepted as a teaching tool in the educational community. So while Udutu is not the perfect web-learning tool it is pretty robust and definitely headed in the right direction.