Don't use iSpring free on your Moodle VLE
One of the problems with teachers uploading PowerPoints to Moodle -or indeed any VLE/LMS – is that not all their students have MS Office at home. Even if they do, they might have an earlier version and therefore not be able to open their teachers’s 2007 masterpiece. While there are many workarounds – offer Powerpoint Viewer or (better) use OpenOffice, another solution is to convert to Flash. This can be done easily in OpenOffice but if your presentation is – perish the thought!- full of whizzy animations and transitions then they won’t transfer. Enter iSpring free - a free Powerpoint to Flash converter that converts your slideshows with animations -with sound -with video - and even with your exploding text if you really have to… It’s been used and recommended amongst the Moodle community for over a year now. It’s been mentioned in several Moodle books from Packt and by other Moodle bloggers such as Ian Usher. But the other day a county ICT advisor alerted me to the fact that he’d been refused permission to use iSpring free on his Moodle. The terms and conditions state that iSpring free is for personal use only, such as in blogs and websites. I – and I daresay many other happy Moodlers -had assumed personal use meant an individual teacher could put on a iSpring version of their lesson’s Powerpoint for their own individual class within Moodle (or Frog, or Fronter..) But no. When I double-checked the response I got was – quote:
iSpring Free is for personal non-commercial use only. It cannot be used for creating public presentations of any kind, even for educational purposes. I am sorry about that. …We are glad to provide educational establishments representatives with a 25% discount in case of purchasing a single license of iSpring Pro, a great tool for elearning courses authoring. The original price of the product is $249. Considering your academic status, the price will be $186.75.
Sadly, my school is unwilling to pay the reduced $186.75 and so I am on the lookout for alternatives. For my part, I shall suggest to the company that their make the terms of usage for the free version much clearer, particularly with the prevalence of VLEs and the need to find a suitable way to make presentations viewable by all users. For your part, Dear Readers – if you have iSpring free on your class pages – take them off! Or else, of course, buy the pro version and get a licence. And if you have that sort of money perhaps you might like to buy one for me too…
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