E-Learning Curve Blog

Free-to-use e-learning development 12: Microsoft Producer

Today, I’m moving from the realm of open source software proper into the domain of free-to-use e-learning software. As I said in yesterday’s post:

My view is that both [libre and gratis] categories of software enable me to meet my objective of developing courseware. Being of a practical disposition, I don’t really suffer an ethical dilemma in combining a range of tools if they assist me in achieving my goals. With this in mind, I will discuss some of these free-to-use / gratis tools next time.

So, no abuse from freetards please: I’m not interested. And with that proviso, let’s crack on and look at Microsoft Producer.

With the development and on-going improvement of the global high-speed internet infrastructure, streaming media has become a mainstream technology: while more generally known through consumer applications like YouTube and Hulu, the technology is also used as a learning channel, enabling enhanced effectiveness of web-based training, as well as internal and external organizational communications. Some of its benefits include substantial savings on travel and facilities costs, as well as faster information-sharing across an organization.

Microsoft Producer 200x for Microsoft Office PowerPoint is an add-on tool for PowerPoint. Built with Microsoft Windows Media technologies, Producer is designed to meet the growing need among organizations and institutions to use streaming media to create and deliver informational content. One of the challenges many organizations face overcoming the complexity and specialized knowledge needed to rapidly develop e-learning content (typically by combining PowerPoint slides, images, and HTML, with audio and video content to create and deliver rich-media presentations to knowledge workers and other learners. While very limited in many respects, Microsoft Producer does enable non-experts to  create relatively sophisticated multimedia presentations and just-enough, just-in-time (JIT) e-learning.

Producer is based upon the familiar Windows MovieMaker UI (see Figure 1), Producer enables content authors to capture and synchronize audio, video, slides, and other media elements, and to render content to a wide-variety of locations. Learners can then view content asynchronously on their computer across an intranet, across the Internet, or via CD or DVD.

Figure 1. MS Producer 2003 User Interface – Media View
[Click to Enlarge]

To run Producer, you must have Microsoft PowerPoint must be installed on your computer and and you must be using the Windows 7, Vista, or XP operating systems. Content is viewed through a web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox, and Windows Media Player.

Microsoft Producer has a reasonably rich feature set including:

As with most free-to-use software packages, there are restrictions on Microsoft Producer: you can only author in a Windows environment and you must have PowerPoint installed, for example. Equally restrictive is that you can only render content using Windows Media formats and its web browser support is… well, let’s just say stick to IE if you want reliable playback. That said, Windows Media is a stable media file format, but it looks (and is) a little clunky in the age of FLV, MP4, and even Microsoft’s own Silverlight media platforms. With these constraints in mind, my experience is that it’s a pretty good tool for those organizations and institutions that only need to do a small amount of on-demand media distribution, have no need for high-end synchronous collaboration, and are not too worried about the aesthetic quality of their content.

The most current full release of Microsoft Producer is the 2003 version; Producer  2007 (as in, it’s for MS Office 2007) is still in Beta – and will remain so until 2010.

The features and functionality of Producer 2007 are essentially the same as those in Producer 2003. The program is compatible with PowerPoint 2007 and 2003, Internet Explorer 7.0 or better, Windows Vista and (apparently) Windows 7. The Producer development team are currently targeting sometime during Winter 2009/2010 to release the final version of Producer 2007 to the Office Download Center. Click here to find out more about Producer 2007.

More next time…

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November 12 2009 04:00 pm | e-learning

5 Responses to “Free-to-use e-learning development 12: Microsoft Producer”

1. Kimberly Redd on 15 Nov 2009 at 9:03 pm #

   Hello Mr. Hanley, my name is Kimberly. I am a graduate student at Walden University studying Instructional Design and Technology. I have over seven years of experience in education and minimal experience in using digital technolgy in my instruction. I truly appreciate that you for providing the knowledge of free tools such as Microsoft Producer. Tools such as this allow me to not only practically apply what I’m learning but also become more comfortable with using technology in instruction. Many of your post are directly in line with what we are studying in our theory class and I find your posts to be very insightful. I look forward to your future posts providing further insight on the practical application of these tools.

   Kimberly

2. Free-to-use e-learning development 14: Learning Content Development System | E-Learning Curve Blog on 19 Nov 2009 at 4:01 pm #

   [...] Learning Content Development System Having recently looked at two pretty good free-to-use tools (Producer and Media Encoder) from a surprising source (Microsoft), today I will discuss the third in their [...]

3. Free-to-use e-learning development 15: Wink | E-Learning Curve Blog on 23 Nov 2009 at 3:03 pm #

   [...] e-learning development 15: Wink The Microsoft tools (Producer, Media Encoder, LCDS) we looked at over the last three blog posts are pretty good at integrating [...]

4. A Toolkit to Develop E-Learning in an Open (XML) Environment | E-Learning Curve Blog on 07 Dec 2009 at 4:51 pm #

   [...] Microsoft Producer 2 [...]

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