The new Rapid Intake mLearning studio looks like it's on its way to become a great authoring tool for all of us who are into ubiquitous learning.Last Friday I had the pleasure of talking to David Blakely from Rapid Intake solutions. Rapid Intake is company that thrives on its dynamic developers and it shows. They have focused their recent energy on coming up with an authoring tool that allows instructional designers to deliver content across multiple devices while keeping the same content logic, though formatting the content towards the device that is connecting to that content. You can follow them on twitter via @rapidintake.
For those of you who want to take a look at the Rapid Intake mLearning studio, or Rapid Mobile, feel free to take a look at a course example and how it tailors itself to the device that is connecting to it. You can ask for a demo, or get on their mLearning mailing list, so you will be the first to know when they launch this html5/flash authoring tool to the big public!
The tool uses html5 whenever a mobile device connects to the content. They are testing it on android2.2 (galaxy tab, smartphones), iPad and iPhone, and a blackberry version will follow at a later stage. The great thing about this authoring tool is that the developer only has to author one time, once the learners uses the course the device will get the output that fits its specifics. The learners on desktops will see the application in flash, the others on html5. The tool also allows a lot of personalization, which is great for designers.
Additionally, it is scorm comformant, so you can bookmark, which makes it ideal for ubiquitous learning as it memorises where you - as a learner - where looking at the content, so if afterwards you connect to it with another device, it immediately recalls what you have seen and which answers you gave. You can also deliver it to any scorm LMS.
Although the tool will only be launched in March 2011, I had the pleasure of playing around with it (desktop, iPhone and Android running 2.3). Swiping moves the learner from page to page and it works smoothly. At this point in time they have only enabled a couple of templates (text, video, picture and a couple of quizes), but it looks great already. Possibility to add a page narration as well, which is nice. The example course ran smoothly and wonderfully on my desktop, iPad and iPhone, but it was not completely running as it should on my Android phone. Nevertheless, they still have 2 months to get everything up to speed and ... it is really worth a look. This tool will save me a lot of developing time, so yes, I will keep an eye out for when it launches in March.