AI Empowered Course SCORM Content Creation With Joe Gorup From CourseAvenue

In this episode, Joe Gorup goes into great detail about how his platform CourseAvenue uses a highly developed AI system called Course Advisor to transform complicated, dense source materials (like technical documents, PDFs, or government regulations) into fully structured, instructionally sound online courses in a matter of minutes.

He emphasizes that the true issue this addresses is that the majority of subject matter experts such as attorneys, engineers, or compliance officers are not qualified teachers, which makes it challenging and costly to transform their expertise into useful training (which often costs up to $100,000 per course). Beyond creation, the platform offers sophisticated learning analytics that analyze everything from individual question performance to completion rates, assisting in the identification of gaps in learner comprehension and course quality. By utilizing a specially designed bridge to enable bookmarking, scoring, and progress tracking, it also tackles important technical issues like SCORM integration within WordPress. Additionally, it guarantees complete accessibility compliance (WCAG/Section 508), making courses usable for students with disabilities.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Joe Goup. He’s the founder of course avenue.com. You gotta see what he is built over@gov.education. Which is a super cool implementation, of course, avenue’s, unique way of creating course content and then feeding it into a lifter LMS site.

But first, welcome to the show, Joe. 

Joe Gorup: Hey, thanks a lot, Chris. I appreciate the chance to chat with you and the folks. Yeah it’s a wild rule in the LMS and education and content space these days and to throw our hat in the ring and show people what we’re doing. So I appreciate the opportunity.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is a busy space. There’s literally 500 LMSs out there. AI is taking over the world. The economy’s in flux and everybody’s just trying to figure things out, and you’re doing some really interesting stuff at the intersection of all those. Tell us about gov. Do education, what is it?

Why’d you build it? How does it work? 

Joe Gorup: Great. It came from the notion of as a company course avenue, which I started early on works a lot in the federal government. People use our core our, authoring tool to build courses on everything from inspecting meat packing plants to ethics compliance for federal lawyers.

And so over the years, we just saw this kind of huge gap between there’s dense regulations. Are hard to understand. And then the volume of time it takes to actually educate someone on what is in these regulations. And the one rule of thumb that we’ve used within the federal government is a hundred thousand dollars per course.

One of my associates, director of training, yeah, I had a million dollars budget and I had to build 10 courses in one year, stressed out to the to the max. But he did it. And I can I can vouch for that. Yeah. It a fully baked compliance course that, that the, to transform that dense regulations into education.

It’s a very expensive process. So with that is my background as, yes, the AI train is, in full of gear here. We were fortunate, one of our one of my co-founders was early on in LLMs having to write Python code before there was any chat. He would talking to LLMs through writing Python code and having Python code, write other Python code.

And we started playing around with. The AI with the goal of, I know instructional systems design. I know the time delay, I know the source content, and we saw what could be done not in chat, and what government education represents is the end of, I don’t know, 15 years of experience management and work in the federal government.

And it, what we do is we take regulations, use AI to transform it and to make courses so people can actually understand what’s in the regulations and yeah. And so we go from federal register document, a document comes out in the federal government and in about four and a half minutes. We have a course, a marketing page, and a course in lifter.

And there could be a lot of skeptics out there. What are those? Oh, how is that possible? And I know in the l in the in the AI space there’s a lot of talk about you can’t use, you can’t really build a course with an LLM and just ai. And I’m here to tell you it, it can be done, but not through a simple chat interface.

And so that making sense? Am I 

Chris Badgett: That is making sense. You get the document from the government, you full, you fold it through your course advisor software. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then it creates course content that you then feed into Lift rails. You’re doing it through an API. Tell us about your setup. Like why does WordPress, and why did you choose WordPress and Lifter as part of this stack?

Joe Gorup: WordPress. It was just handy. It’s ubiquitous. We can pull in plugins as needed. The eco, I didn’t have to worry about the e-commerce interface. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Joe Gorup: and so on a pure convenience and it as a software engineer, as my background, I cringe a little bit about the underlying WordPress ecosystem because like I know we’re, down in the Willy weeds, we’re down in the PHP, we’re down in the code.

And sometimes it gives me heartburn. But from a convenience standpoint, for me to st for me to custom build something, to do everything WordPress does, right? That’s outta the equation. Then we looked at delivering, so we’ve been in the LMS delivery space tangentially, right? Because we have people use our software to build courses.

We have our own little mini LMSA little tracking system. And, but we go, we didn’t wanna have to modify ours, and we looked around on the, like most people do Google searching AI things and Lifter came across our desk and we poked it. We used your trial period and we said, Hey, we kicked the tires, but we wanna kick ’em to kick the tires from the bottom.

How scalable is it and a thousand courses later using your API? It’s been rock solid. And one of the things we struggled with out in the market was our output from our product is a storm compliant. Or 10 can compliance course. And there’s that little bit of a gap of how do I launch those?

And there’s some solutions out there and I didn’t like. We tried one and it was it was klugy and it was funny because we like the lifter API, we know our code and we just need something to bridge the gap. So we wrote a little thin interface layer between a course, avenue course that I can create publishes score.

I can put it in my corporate LMS or wherever else I wanna put it. But then we can also just put that in lifter, like you said, we create the lesson, the course wrapper for that lesson. And then. Our course shows up as a little piece that gets launched in track. So all the bookmarking, the things you want, the book especially bookmarking and completion status are the top couple things that we leverage back and forth.

It’s a very, so we, again, we love the scalability the fact that we can talk to it. The API has worked to the tune of I think 1,005 courses. 

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. And can you tell more about how you solved the SCORM WordPress problem of playing SCORM content and tracking in WordPress?

Because there are some off the shelf solutions, a couple players out in the market, but it sounds like you built your own, which is awesome and it’s always been a little bit of a friction point between. Because WordPress native people see WordPress as a content management system. So they’re gonna create their content in WordPress, right?

Not necessarily separately, but when you do create SCORM files or some benefit to that, 

Joe Gorup: right? 

Chris Badgett: But as well. So how did you bridge those worlds? 

Joe Gorup: What? Having been in this role a long time, the essence of what people want is I wanna launch a course, I wanna know who’s taking the course. So from a, if I had my course perspective hat on I wanna launch, it.

So I have to know those per in score, right? It’s just a set of parameters, the CMI data of the for the learner. And so our little, it’s basically a little shim. I, call it, it’s a, it’s not a massive piece of software that’s, below. It’s basically, I know the, I can talk to the lifter side, you’re gonna tell me who this person is, and then we have a little piece that just launches our course, pretending like it’s being launched from a score compliant system.

And we have a little, and in there we have a log file. So I can tell you like every time we send a bookmark, so any learner that takes a course in lifter from a course avenue built course, I can tell. I, our log file will tell you the learner id, the learner name, all the communications back and forth, and it’s just, it came natural to us.

’cause that’s, we’re software company and that’s what we do. So we weren’t trying to solve the, I have course builder 3000, the publishes score. ’em and, now I want to use WordPress to connect the two. So we aren’t trying to mill. Ubiquitous. We’re not gonna try to retire on a, scoring to lifter tool, but for anyone that uses our product, they can press a button and with our little, with a plug, with a little course avenue plugin, your course and Lifter will communicate back and forth.

We will set the completion status back to lifter. And as they’re going through, the course of the bookmarks are all stored, which is usually that’s the, those are the main things people want. And then if I could plug one more piece to that puzzle what we know is people like bookmarking, they like completion status and they like scoring.

And the one problem it’s, it goes deep into the whole scoring of 2004 revision you on. I wanna know. Is everyone missing? Question five, is the question bad? I have knowledge checks Are PE what Most everyone puts knowledge checks in their courses or they should, or they like to question. How do you, how are people doing?

Do you have any notion of not you got storing ’em ’cause they’re just knowledge checks. Course avenue we have for years we’ve had this module called Analyze. Where we, track that. And so the people that take our courses in Lifter, if they launch the course with, I can, if I look at my analyze reports, I can tell you, I can tell you how many seconds someone took, to answer a question.

We have a whole suite of learning analytics down to that individual learner, taking an individual question. Data, which is extremely helpful. One of our customers is the Federal Aviation Administration. Medical doctors that wanna be certified by the FAA have to be re-certified, right? So in that level of high consequence training, knowing they got a 75% on the test isn’t good enough because again, like I said, maybe everyone’s missing the same 25%.

The questions are bad. 

And, I kind and without knowing, is everybody missing these eight questions or is everyone choosing C and the actual is B because the distractor is wrong? And so I, it’s so I’m That is a, very powerful element on top of the fact that yes, it’s just scor we know score.

It’s been confusing from the score world of tracking individual or responses. There’s, It is not standardized, but we’ve standardized it and it’s, it works extremely well. So we get not only just bookmarking data completion status scoring, but then scoring down to the, if you check a box to track it, I can track it down.

Or of course, avenue courses can track down to the individual response the individual response and just That’s awesome. Yeah. And just a page, just to how that works is, you build your course in course Avenue Studio when you hit the publish button, we have, this is really fascinating when you’re looking at the course from a course developer standpoint, if you click on the learning analytics tab, we will tell you up to the, basically within probably four hours, we summarize all the data.

So you can literally click on a section, a lesson, an exam, a question, and get the individual learner responses, including survey questions. That’s a very powerful piece of the puzzle. And that’s how people that use Course Evan do to build the courses. It’s not just publish and forget it, it’s, it becomes, if you’re using that analytics, you get learning analytics as a part of the development process.

So you can go and fix the question that everyone’s missing, republish it and see how, see what happens next. 

Chris Badgett: Does that, mean that Course Avenue is a learning record store as well? So this, L-M-S-L-R-S, all these, 

Joe Gorup: yeah. 

Chris Badgett: 10 can API. It gets a little confusing, but is it 

Joe Gorup: I guess if I put my 10 cat, 10 K or XAPI.

In that respect, it’s an option when you’re using our product. And so we, we’ve literally had this before TinCan came out. And so I was at the conference when, at the TinCan announcement. I’m like, we’re already doing that. And yes, if people want that data, you check a couple boxes, enable this for this.

Maybe I don’t want analytics, I want the final exam, whatever it is. And we will send back that data and we do store it in course Avenue Studio. Some people hate that idea. I just want just, I wanna publish it and get it outta your authoring platform. Hey, I got that. That’s fine. A lot of people are wanting to know the effectiveness, of their learning by measuring and seeing that level of detail.

Chris Badgett: But on Gov education 

Joe Gorup: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: Does the SCORM file live on that website? 

Joe Gorup: We have a storage mechanism within Course Avenue. So it, you, the courses are, does 

Chris Badgett: it kinda I frame in or does it actually serve from your WordPress 

Joe Gorup: site? It’s, it serves from our WordPress site. 

Chris Badgett: Okay, 

Joe Gorup: cool. So you’re in Lifter and you take, you click on Launch My Lesson and it just, a window appears.

Yeah, and that’s our course. And it’s talking, it talks back to the WordPress site that. We have hosted and then it updates the score or lifter with the status 

Chris Badgett: and talks back if they choose to. The course Avenue Analytics as well. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah, we do. And I, and part of that is for those that are skeptical of an AI created course, and I get that we have literally spent, like I said, we were very early on in the AI world before there was a chat, and so we have refined the process of creating education.

And I was, one of the courses we have is on maritime education and I was really proud that people were taking the course and the feedback has been extremely positive and it’s one thing to build a course, and in our case, we don’t know, course Avenue was not a maritime cybersecurity expert, but we sell a course on it that was created by a course advisor.

I’m like and, we knew it was good. We’ve done enough of, and enough QA know, like we think it’s, but to have an external third party who we’d never met before, right? Some company in Ohio bought the course and then bought 10 more copies for their folks and. So for us, from a validation standpoint, a director of cyber security for a company in this domain took our course, liked it so much that he bought 10 more copies.

And for that we, our custom order, we actually manually sold them that. So we, did the manual enrollments in in lifter for 10 of those folks. But so that was another, I guess another feature was the fact that we could, API it people could make it self development and then. We put our, LMS management hat on, and we just use, we use the lifter manual enrollment, which worked great, and they’re all there and it’s in there my courses list.

Yeah, so not only did we develop the course took, the maritime san course took about, I think four and a half minutes to create. It’s sold through our lifter L-M-S-L-M-S piece and it’s revenue positive. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to be clear course avenue.com is like your course creation, content creation business.

Joe Gorup: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And Gov education is an example where you’re using your own software to create profitable training, even though you’re not like a maritime No captain expert. Your process is able to create valuable training materials for an industry. Yeah. Which is really cool. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. What you mentioned the the subject matter expert ker.

So like how do you extract this information and what we wanted to do with gov education, it’s a real thing, right? There is a problem with, there’s new HIPAA compliance laws federal man derivatives trading, new rules, regulations from the SEC, it’s 

Chris Badgett: say 95, I just wanna say 95% of subject matter experts are not trained as educators, teachers, or coaches.

So this is the huge problem. There’s a lot of great subject matter experts that maybe they make a technical document, like in this case, a legal 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Thing. But it’s a great problem to focus on and I’m so glad you’re doing that at Course Avenue. 

Joe Gorup: Yep. Yeah. And yeah, but you hit the nail on the head.

Course Avenue is the authoring tool, the product that we have that has course advisor built in and to quell the, or the, naysayers. We created Gov education because it’s like we’re gonna, we’re right, we’re gonna use our own tool. We’re gonna automate like the 

Chris Badgett: hair club for men. You’re also a client, right?

Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah. My, my hair’s a whole nother story, but but yes. But yeah, that we wanted to make it, is it scalable? Is it repeatable? And it could produce high quality. And we saw that for, we have basically every significant federal regulation since, 2024, is on government education. So we skipped some of the little the, Prune Festival celebration in in, Georgia.

We’re not gonna build a course on that. But again derivatives training, maritime, cybersecurity, huge changes. Food stamp program, the SNAP program. I one, there’s 200. When they change, they’re actually changing the packaging rules for products at the USDA. And we have a course on it, but it’s buried the logic, the actual what is happening is buried in that document.

So for anyone that’s listening, if you do have those, you’re the subject matter expert in whatever you’re, in. If you have some source material, as Chris mentioned, that transformation part. It’s not easy. You’re not trained in ISD. And so our thought is, hey, if we can augment that, take what you give us.

We do the ISD, and then your job is to just correct if it’s wrong. So we have our, marketing phrases, AI powered, human refined, and that’s what we believe in. They aa might, they might get it wrong. You may want to t you’re gonna want to tweak things. You wanna put your own stamp on there, personalize it.

And that’s, so you use course, so we generate it, it’s in course Avenue Studio, which is targeted towards non-tech. Gees. If you wanna get down and use the course Avenue API, you can do that. But we’re really about enabling subject matter experts to edit Main, and we’ve been doing that for a good long time.

Mostly in the US government is helping people do just what we’re talking about. And now we see we can actually enable lots of people, with all the content we do have and or reaching out folks like you guys to help spread the word that, yeah, we wanna solve that problem. 

Chris Badgett: Cool. Who, are like some of the clients, like what type of person is a really good fit for course, avenue or company or business or organization or whatever, 

Joe Gorup: someone that wants to, to what?

We’ve used the term measured communications. In other words, you have, like today, what we see is a lot of companies are struggling with the fact that I have again, standard operating procedures, rules, regulations a manual. And that transformation has taken so long using traditional methods with instructional systems, designers sitting down, it can be very expensive.

And so if it, and then, so having people that, that have those problems, if they want to transform it into education, that would be a great. C prospect for us. Also it’s like folks that are currently today, they’re taking their p their, domain experience. Their domain, I’m sorry, their domain expertise.

They’re putting it in a PowerPoint and posting it somewhere. Or I’ll put it in a, I’ll take my notes. They’re in A PDF or create a YouTube video. I did a demo. You did a demo of your product. It’s in YouTube. You may get some little analytics. You may. You may see how many views you had in A PDF. You post somewhere, it’s you may, you hope someone read it.

But what about if I took your PDF and transformed it into an education piece that was now measurable? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh, 

Joe Gorup: I can now tell you how many minutes the person spent on it. I’ll generate questions based on your PDF and you, the person that wrote it, can see how they did. And then you know how long they spent on it.

And did they get it? So as opposed to just throwing stuff out in the ether and like hoping, and I hope they get it, the education aspect and what course advisors can do is can transform that into something. Now you have a shared context. You’re, setting a learning objective and the things that don’t come natural to.

Expert, right? A subject of expert is not gonna think in terms of learning design, but what that power that does is it, now makes it your communications from this linear PDF out or YouTube out in the ether to a measurable element that you can gauge and understand how people are they learning something, which is really what you want.

So that’s the, kind of a big picture. The second picture as I think I mentioned. For people that are trying to sell content online, right? And again, we big fans of your product and lifter, we, I say big fans, there’s a thousand horses in there. It’s help helping people with that problem.

Your domain experts, you’re not ISDs are you hiring people? You hire, you got the course out there, now you, oh, geez, you wanna make some changes, right? We’ve seen a lot of cases where a subject matter expert really knows tax accounting, really knows how to grow fruit trees in Arkansas. Like they just wanna, they wanna make some money on that.

They hire someone to develop the course and then they, oh, how we make an update. There’s a, new frost thing we learned. They have to go back to the person they paid to create the course, all the content and that can time consuming and expensive. It can be really expensive in some cases.

So all about pushing, enabling people to build and manage their own education without, and making it key is instructionally sound and available just quicker. A lot quicker. And then self maintainable. That’s we’re about. An 

Chris Badgett: AI question for you. ISD instructional design curriculum design course content creation.

It sounds easy, but it’s not, and 

Joe Gorup: no. 

Chris Badgett: And if a human steps up to an AI like ChatGPT, with my. Let’s say I wrote a nonfiction book on a topic and I plug it in and tell Chad, GBT to make me a course about this. That’s like a very junior way to do it. I’m sure what you’re doing, there’s there’s way more that goes into working with AI to actually create a valuable course.

Like what’s an example that a non-instructional, a concept that a non-instructional designer would be helpful to just learn. 

Joe Gorup: I, in our experience you see all the stuff online about ai either a, it’s gonna actually change the world. Everyone’s gonna lose their jobs. We’re gonna be doing as humans are gonna be doing nothing.

On the other hand, epic failures, it deleted all the code and it, aired out and as a train wreck. And so what we’ve seen is you could, the chat gpt of the world from an end user perspective are deceivingly powerful. You can create an outline of a course. It gives you this positive feedback.

You can, you could do some things, but how do you operate? The key is operationalizing that and to the essence of your question is, that how can I not just have it do something but actually manufacture and make it part and do this process because ISD is not a one stop, press the button and get something out.

And so I, wish I had a great answer for people. Other than with my self-promotion hat on of use Course Advisor. But there’s that gap between I wanted to use chat to get some valuable information out and fully operationalize it as we have is huge. Again, and under our covers we’re, an education company, but under the covers we’re a software engineering company, so our techniques have been working on.

Interface like we interface with you guys with, lifter, LMS, user API, we use the APIs of the LLMs to have a, it’s an extended conversation when it takes four or five minutes to create a course. In our world the conversation that’s going on, how much content do we have? What’s the essence of the content?

How do you maintain context? When you’re going after building a given page of content versus in 155 page document. So there’s all these tools that unfortunately today they require programmatic conversations. And so I don’t have any handy tips for your listeners that say, oh, if you just do this prompt it’s not, it’s prompt engineering and software engineering combined with.

Our 20 plus years of doing course development put into a big, we call it the factory. So our gov education is run by our AI factory, which is a very complicated piece of software. I give you one a quick example. It’s like you can’t be generic. So if I have 150 page document. How the structure of that’s gonna be different than a 10 page document.

And so we have different models that we’ll use depending on, we analyze the, so we analyze the source material dynamically. Oh, this is this, I don’t want, I don’t want one section, in one lesson in 50 pages. I don’t want in my course, but I don’t want that the, but I don’t need 50 core, 50 sections, 50 lessons and isn’t going support so much.

So what we do is we actually have this conversation with the content and ai, with our own knowledge to actually construct, to like literally hand build just really, quickly. Of course. And so, for example, that again, that differentiation of. What is the overall source material? Girth, for lack of a better term, and I just wanted to use the word girth, but and then that’ll affect the output of the course. And then there’s still another dimension of that, which, let me stop for a second if you have any other questions, but I wanna talk about the source material can provide a course, but that’s just the first leg of the journey, am I making sense about your AI question?

Did I answer that? 

Chris Badgett: You are making sense. I have a another question about accessibility. I’m not sure to drop that in here or not 

Joe Gorup: Sure. 

Chris Badgett: But okay. Yeah, keep going. 

Joe Gorup: Okay. The okay. I’m trying to think of what I kinda lost my train of thought there when I, paused. Oh, the I know. But, so we talked about the course. So I upload my PDF and we’ll take, I’ll take a a, federal government example, look at watershed management and all the elements. There’s new regulations about what’s a watershed and how we’re gonna maintain it, and how you do these measurements.

It’s a 95 page dense regulations headache inducing, written by extremely savvy. Subject matter experts, right? The team that built that, they’re half lawyers, they’re half geologists, and this thing will just it’s brutally hard to understand. We can build a course on that. We call it a baseline course.

When we come in and the topic is the document. Educate me on what’s in this thing. Overall that’s valuable. ’cause I can’t sit through the 85 page document, but it’s again, it’s a baseline course and what we know, right? In good learning design, you’re targeting a topic, an audience to a certain depth of learning.

And I think that’s one of the other things that we see with the people that use, that try to generate a course with Chet ut of why they fail so often is because they’re not factoring those other dimensions. So in my watershed example, I create a baseline course. I can give it to you, you can buy it from us, and hey, great, I now understand what’s in the document.

In course advisor part of the, magic, if you will, is I can then press the button that says, run me a training matrix, build me a training matrix. We then look through the document and identify the main topics. It’s watershed surveys. It’s watershed soil recognition. It’s water it’s stream development and water flow diagramming.

And then there’s compliance, and then there’s fines. And what happens if you do something wrong? So our training, our course advisor will run through the document, pick out the topics. For every given topic, we’ll identify reasonable target audiences. Is it an inspector, is it a landowner, is it a developer?

So given topic, I have a set of audiences, and then this is really cool. Then it comes down to what level of detail and to put my learning geek hat on using Bloom’s taxonomy. Are we talking a level one, an awareness level or an application level? Course, and I can then check a box. I literally check I want, give me four watershed management, soil analysis composition elements.

Give me an awareness level course for landowners, and then an application level course for inspectors. You press the button, have a grab a cup of coffee I’m not kidding. Come back and you’ll have the courses ready to be edited and reviewed. And, now then you edit them, tweak ’em, change ’em. And then just for those, not in the tech geeky world, like what does it mean by this taxonomy level and level of detail?

What’s fascinating is when you look at a an awareness level course, you just wanna know Hey, yeah, there’s soil, there’s composition, and I need to type. There’s four different types. Got it. Now an application level. You just can’t know. There’s four. You have to know the four, and you have to know why it’s a 1, 2, 3, or four.

And what’s what I, this gives me, this is fascinating to me. In our courses that we create, you can really tell by the assessment, by the questions that are generated. And it is fascinating to see that the questions for level one will be that are there, how many different types of soil compositions are there?

Four. In the application level, it’ll give you a case study. In the case where soil composition is 87% manure with a hydro acidity level of 6.2, what is the most appropriate level or assignment for this next step? I’m like, wow. We can literally create that level of education that challenges people to understand.

And you can’t, I, you can’t, you can guess. You may get it right. But I will the every course that we’ve seen that does that, it is a the, you just can’t really, you have to know it. Like I hydroxy level is the type two I it’s fascinating. So bigger picture, yes, it’s a course. But then the course matrix is what is extremely powerful.

’cause I can now target a, securities dealer in New York, or am I talking to the broker manager or am I talking to our SEC regulator all on that route document. So again, from a. Not everyone has federal documents, but everyone hopefully listening, you have some domain experience. You’re trying to educate somebody on something.

So what? Do whatever you have of it’s like that transformation and I’ll call it like transformation plus. That’s transformation. Plus a matrix opportunity to target the learners as opposed to trying to create one giant course. For everybody. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a tough one. Yeah, so there’s that.

And then you asked about accessibility. Should I talk about that for a 

Chris Badgett: second? Yeah, go for it. 

And I just wanna say for those that don’t know, accessibility is really important in online education. It could be somebody using a screen reader who had, who doesn’t have vision, or somebody who can’t hear if there’s audio content and all kinds of stuff.

This is what accessibility is if you don’t know. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. And another, a good example is lapu. Some that don’t have hands. Simply use voice command software. We’ve seen people have disabilities where they literally will say the word keyboard tab. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Joe Gorup: And then they’re it’s not really a screen reader, it’s a voice recognition software will actually issue the tab.

And so all that is essentially, it’s kinda like you can’t build a restaurant with having, without having a handicapped access bathroom. Yeah. Or yeah, go up the spiral staircase. In your wheelchair. Like you can’t do that in the online world. There’s WCAG is the foundation of accessibility rules, and there are a set of rules, like how do you make something bold and HTML there’s a rule for how you make something accessible.

And HTML and those rule sets, it’s coming called WCAG which is part of WAI, which is part of W three C, the overall, so we’re talking foundational internet. Operations. It’s extremely difficult to achieve that. I’ll just tell you a lot of other tools out there will say, yes, you can build accessible e-learning with our product.

Step one, become an accessibility expert. Here’s wca.com. Oh gosh, no, very few people can do that. And let alone know what this, so if step one is learn how to build your own wheelchair ramp oh gosh, that’s a tough road to hoe. So what course avenue is done? We’ve actually integrated in.

The accessibility rules, section 5 0 8 and WCAG. Section 5 0 8 is within the government W. So if you’re a government supplier, you get to be quote section 5 0 8, which is basically just the rule. It’s the rule set for government. Outside of that, it’s WCAG. We build it into our product. So we’re like the only e-learning offering company that will say, if you build a course in our product, we will guarantee the output.

The output will be five away compliant. And we have a built-in accessibility analysis tool that will actually run through and, tell you page by page, object by object, if it’s good or bad. I’ll give you one, one common example that most people can relate to, and most people are probably guilty of this too, right?

You’re in Microsoft, I’ll give you a word example, but this applies to a course as well your honor. You’re writing a document. You have a, please remember the following, four key, ethical the following requirements, and you take the requirements sentence, please. Please review the following requirements.

You highlight it, you make it bold, and you increase the font a couple notches. So most of your body text is 16. Now you have a 20 pitch font bold. It’s ah. And then you have your list, right? That’s a violation of five compliance. That’s a violation of accessibility right there. Why? Because visually that looks like a header.

The person using the street mirror that’s blind doesn’t know that. It just says the following. Now they can infer it, right? They can infer like the, if you literally say the following, four things are important, colon. But there’s a zillion cases where they don’t know that, and then it gets really complicated because if you have these following in these three sections, and then the three sections has another subsection, visually you can see it looks like subheading, subheading.

The person using the screen reader can’t, they can’t see it, so they rely on it being header tagged. In our product, if you, we actually have like fuzzy logic in there that says if we see a page and we see something bold with a colon after it. So all these little rules that we have, we’ll call it out as an implied header.

Do you, are you really. Like ahead of us. It maybe not be, but it probably is. And then, by the way, here’s the fix, highlight it format. H three, make it a heading. Visually, you probably won’t even know a difference, but it’s literally the difference between making it accessible or inaccessible.

Yeah. And so if you’re, working off of a grant with the federal government, the document you sign says is five W. It needs to be accessible. And I it, is literally part of just it’s federal law. Not many people do it well, and we do it well. And so I give talks on five away compliance and all that kind of stuff.

So I, I can go on for a lot more, but I won’t. But if you’re concerned about that the people that can’t tab. Keyboard accessibility is so huge, especially we’re seeing more and more of that, of everything from, I had personal experience with returning veterans that can’t use a mouse. And if your course or your content says, welcome to our course, click here to begin.

And you have to, you don’t recognize the keyboard. It’s just, not cool. It’s, doing a disservice. And as more content’s being pumped out. That divide that gap between people that need to get the content that just happen to have some kind of mobility issue. They can’t use a mouse.

It’s not all about the people that just visually can’t see. That’s a big part of it. But again, the key is another thing that is, is big. It’s important ’cause you, it just, again, it’s the right thing to do. And I’m, proud of what Course Avenue has been able to do in that community to, to, and generate.

To make it, so again, I call mere mortals, normal people can create something and then the output is five away compliant. And if it’s not, if there’s a question, we as a company will back, we’re there, we have your back. And I can say that because we do work in the government. We have literally millions of learners that have used our courses and there’s never been a, technology issue with a course having a course.

So that’s all about accessibility for now, 

Chris Badgett: working with government that you would have to meet the accessibility need or requirement. But that’s awesome that you’re so passionate about it anyways, that really every course creator, it’s like a cherry on top. Not only are you helping subject matter experts solve the experts curse.

By turning volume of content into actual usable online course, but you’re also making it accessible to all types of people. 

Joe Gorup: Yep. That’s 

Chris Badgett: great. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah, it is. The funny is we got, started in the whole federal government because of our promise, inaccessibility. ’cause that’s a, it is a really hard problem to solve and I’ll just.

It bothers me when I see a sexy demo. So I authoring tool out there, look at all these cool flashing lights and bells and whistles and whirling fans. And then they’ll also say, you can make five way compliant software e-learning courses. And what they don’t tell you is the demo you just saw.

Isn’t fine, isn’t accessible, it just looks really good. And then so I’ve seen people have that buyer’s remorse where it’s like they realize it, they did all these, things. And then they found out later that, oh yeah the questions aren’t really accessible or if you want to use that interaction type.

The whirling fan interaction? That’s not really accessible. Oh that’s horrible. So interactions, of course, avenue Studio are accessible. Flip cards, accordions, drag and drop even. You build a drag and drop interaction in our product and we spend a lot of time, effort, energy to make sure that it’s available using keyboards.

It’s a keyboard accessible. Oh, drag and drop element. So 

Chris Badgett: that’s incredible. Yeah. That’s Joe Gora. He’s from Course Avenue. Go to course avenue.com. Also check out Gov Education, which is an implementation using Course Avenue’s technology called Course Advisor. 

Joe Gorup: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: And Joe, thank you for telling your story.

Thank you for being a shining example of a innovator and technologist using lifter LMS, but also with a lot of. Strong values of helping subject matter experts and making the web accessible. It’s really admirable. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Joe Gorup: Oh, I appreciate it.

Appreciate Chris. Thanks a appreciate.

Speaker 2: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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