Best 'Rapid' software ever!

Best ‘Rapid’ software ever?

Forget ‘Rapid’, this hell-for-leather software must be the quickest and easiest course builder on the market. ‘Rocket Coursebuilder’ promises you full courses on any subject in minutes, yes minutes, with unlimited licences, all for $9.99.

The tool has six software modules, which you can mix and match to create your own courses (classroom and/or e-learning), without any prior knowledge or training. The truly amazing feature is that you need no subject matter experts or expertise, the software does it all. Blend the following components in any order on any subject and, hey presto, you’ll have a corporate classroom training course quicker than Jesus turned water into wine. 

 ‘C’reator

First a quick dose of alliteration. ‘C’ word creator puts the ‘C’ into courseware. The creator selects from a considerable database of ‘c’ words including;  creativity, challenge, commitment, communication, compassion, cooperation, collaboration, curation, connections, culture, conflict, clarity, concise, context, competence, change, chemistry, contribute, critique, compelling, coordination, consultation, community etc. It takes five of these, randomly, and inserts the phrase, ‘The 5 ‘Cs of..............’ In fact, pick any letter, apart from those pesky ones at the end of the alphabet, and’C’reator will define your course structure in seconds.

Shape Sharpener

First step is to choose from the menu of a ‘square, triangle or circle’. Then choose the number of segments and shove in words (preferably starting with the same letter). For hierarchies, it recommends triangles with the important thing at the top and the rubbish category at the bottom. Something like Maslow’s hierarchy of the bleeding obvious is used as an exemplary model. Or there’s the interlocking circle of arrows, always good for the continuous process, because not many people realise that things in life go on and on and on and on and on. The square with four quadrants is also available, as we all know that anything in the world of knowledge and skills can be split into four things with two axes.

Quotator

Zipping up a good quote or two, culled from the quotes database, gives an atmosphere of intellectual seriousness or credibility, especially if it’s by Aristotle, Samuel Johnson or Einstein. Einstein quotes are great, as he never actually said any of them but they have gravitas. For every one of these you’ll need a lighter touch, something by Groucho Marx always goes down well. It needn’t be relevant, just amusing. If you’re talking about the future of anything, there’s quotes from the likes of the IBMs CEO Watson who thought there’d only be the need for five computers in the world (this is a sure-fire winner, as no one is likely to have heard it before). He didn't actually say it - but nobody knows or cares.

Cartoons Cart

You can pull in a cartoon from the Cartoon Cart in seconds. Just type in the level of your audience and subject, and a Dilbert or Doonesbury cartoon, that need only be distantly related to the topic, will pop up. This lightens things up. Everyone loves a cartoon but Peanuts may is deemed too lightweight for all but Leadership courses. Mad, The Far Side and The Simpsons are reserved for techies.

Breakout Builder

To give the illusion of collaboration and, let’s face it, this gets the students do all the work, an online breakout planner is included. Simply pop in a nice open question(s), and this software will split trainees into groups, allow them to vote on a chair online, provide a discussion forum, then the voted chair reports back online (no writing it all on flipcharts and pinning them around the walls with bluetack ruining the walls). Virtual mints and sweets also appear on the centre of the screen. The software then promises to email the results to all participants (one particularly realistic feature is that it doesn’t actually send them anything at all).

Assessinator

The final module deals with assessment and provides multiple choice questions that can be peppered throughout the course (formative assessment) or at the end (summative assessment). It generates multiple choice questions by pulling out stuff from the web, creating questions such as ‘Rank these in order of importance’ or ‘Which of the following is relevant to...’ Even better is the options creator which automatically generates four options; one completely stupid, a couple of likely suspects and the right answer.

Even smarter than all of these six modules is the ‘Happy Sheet Generator’, which tracks the trainees’ mood by getting them to choose from rows of emoticons. These results are then translated into a full report with bar chart graphs, statistics and business impact scores, all of which can be handed over to the CEO - under the heading data analytics.