Sana EasyGenerator - E-Learning Tool

This month Paul Johns, one of Kineo’s senior developers and tool experts, takes a look at Sana EasyGenerator, an impressive online e-learning tool all the way from the Netherlands.

A bit about Sana EasyGenerator
EasyGenerator claims to ‘make creating e-learning easy for everyone’. It’s a big claim – does it hold up? The answer is generally yes. The software is aimed at non-technical writers and designers who will – with a bit of practice – be able to create and edit e-learning content fairly easily using the tool. More advanced developers/programmers can use many of the advanced features of EasyGenerator such as talking directly to Flash files and creating master page templates using CSS. So you get out of it what you put into it, really.

How did we get on?
I must admit I love getting ‘stuck in’ and trying to create pages/courses instantly. Tools that don’t allow you to do this are a little suspect. Sana EasyGenerator certainly lets you get stuck in. The user interface is very simple to use – there are a series of various icons along the top. You can create a new course, chapter, question pool or glossary.

Easy to get started
Being server based you obviously need to be online – so if your designers or writers are going to be hunched over their laptops on trains a lot, this may not be the one for you. Once you log in, you just choose to create a new course. There are various templates for you to design your course with, basic templates such as text, image and flash and a good variety of different question types. We’re finding that all of the tools are starting to use pretty much the same question types, so it’s harder to differentiate between them on this front.

Go create – and re-use…
With the latest version you can now create your own templates. You may have created a new type of screen, the text and graphics are positioned in the right place, and you can now save this as a new template – which is very useful for other pages within this course. This can save a lot of effort when it comes to building courses.

For PowerPoint lovers (you know who you are, there are support groups out there), you’ll recognise the concept of using a Master slide. Here you can set up the screen with any background graphics or icons and add your own navigation buttons in your 'house style', and these are applied to the main content of your course. Simply right-click on any course and you can change the Master slide instantly, so you can change the whole look and feel of your course depending on who the customer or internal audience is. You might create a Health & Safety course that you want to customise for a range of different business areas. It’s very easy to re-badge and change the look and feel by simply applying a different Master slide template to the course. Also, on the Master slide you could add a link to a Glossary or Help file. Simple as you like...

Collaborate with ease
As EasyGenerator is an online-based tool you can have multiple people working on the same course. If someone is editing a particular screen then you’ll see a small padlock against it. But it’s very useful as multiple developers could work on the course, or a designer might go through the pages amending text while the developer is adding new pages.

Bringing in other stuff
I was interested to see how Captivate would work within EasyGenerator – and it's great. On a particular page I can simply import the Captivate .swf if I want a simulation. All very easy.

You can embed video into your course, link and display YouTube videos and ‘talk’ to Flash animations by sending variables back and forth, which can be very powerful.

Adding questions
The question functionality is very good. You can create your own Question Pool, create some good assessments using a variety of different quiz pages such as 'Fill in the blanks', 'Hotspot', 'Drag and drop' and 'Ranking questions'. You can also create quite complex branching depending on a specific answer if you want to go that far (most of the time you won’t need to). With Question Pools you can set the questions to appear randomly or mix up the answers so users can’t cheat and share the answers with others. Not that you would.

Exporting
So you’ve created your course – how are you going to get it out to learners? You can now publish to HTML, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 or to a CD-ROM. You could host the course on your own Learning Management System but Sana also offer a separate package – Sana Learning Portal where you can distribute your courses and tests to your employees. We’ve seen this model for quite a few tools providers – it must be working for them as a revenue stream.

The price of Sana EasyGenerator is very reasonable for a server-based tool and is cheaper than some of the other offerings currently available in that space.

Kineo rating: Very good
Sana EasyGenerator is very easy to use and designers will quickly be able to create courses that hit the mark. Developers can also add features and functionality with Flash API and animations, and import system simulations such as Captivate. Graphic artists could create some great interfaces for the courses and you can export the files as a standard SCORM object. Everyone’s happy.

In our view, EasyGenerator is a very good tool for companies to create quick and interactive training and assessments, it has a decent range of templates, is an easy tool to use and provides great results.

Tried Sana EasyGenerator? Agree or disagree with this review? Let us know.

Got an authoring tool and need get some help in making the most of it? Kineo’s Rapid E-learning Design Team can help. Contact Kineo.

Kineo has accepted no payment or reward in any form, from any tools companies for this independent review.