What is Glasshouse

This is a different type of post to what I normally do. It’s the beginning of a new theme for the blog in which I’ll be ‘thinking out loud’ about how we use Glasshouse to solve learning problems.   

Glasshouse is a cloud-based on eLearning development tool. Sometimes I call it a Learning Content Management tool because it's focused on content development and not on learning delivery (which is what an LMS does). As we look for better ways to support the 70:20:10 model of learning this distinction between content and delivery is beginning to change. More on that in later posts.

The world of web technologies has changed

Sometimes we forget that eLearning is part of the larger web industry. The world of web technologies has changed radically in the last few years. iOS’s lack of support for Flash has meant there has needed to be a rapid change in technology to HTML-based content. Also, many clients now require content to be accessible, and this is often close to impossible with many eLearning authoring tools. The growth of tablets and mobiles with so many different screen sizes has made it difficult to work with ‘PowerPoint-based’ tools with fixed display sizes.  

Multiple platforms

Often, one piece of content needs to seen on multiple platforms, e.g. desktop and mobile. This need for content to be displayed in different formats sparked the creation of Glasshouse. Back when Sprout Labs was just me I was working on a number of Australian Flexible Learning Framework innovation projects, where the content needed to be displayed in multiple formats; in one instance the client wanted the content on a touchscreen but the Framework required the content as SCORM objects. Glasshouse was originally built to solve the problem of displaying content in multiple formats. Since then we have developed a series of interactive activities that make Glasshouse a fully-functional eLearning development platform.  

Glasshouse is a different way of working

We didn’t built Glasshouse from scratch. It’s build on top of the Silverstripe content management system. That means all the basic things like user management, templates and file management is actually core Silverstripe functionality.  

One of the most powerful things about Glasshouse is that it’s an online cloud system, which means:  

• multiple developers can work on it at the same time

• our clients can instantly see changes and we don’t need to be constantly uploading and downloading files.

Getting Glasshouse content into an LMS is straightforward too, because we can directly export SCORM objects, and we have a simple means of integrating content with most LMSs.

In our next Glasshouse post I’ll be discussing some of the work we’re doing to support collaborative and social learning.