ETUG: Pachyderm

Session: Pachyderm: Rich media presentations (2 hr hands-on lab)

Facilitators: Negin Mirriahi and Angela Lam

Description: No technical skills required! This hands-on workshop will introduce Pachyderm, an easy-to-use open source flash based multimedia authoring tool designed for instructors, instructional designers, and students who have little or no skills in multimedia development. Participants will be shown samples of finished Pachyderm presentations and guided through creating their own sample presentation that could be uploaded on any website or imported into a Course Management System. Arts ISIT within the Faculty of Arts at UBC has been one of the initial developers of Pachyderm and currently supports the use of Pachyderm at UBC for both face-to-face and online distance classes.

Pachyderm 2.0

Open source rich media web publishing tool.

Flash based. Requires no local install.

Templates available—seems largely template based, but it's difficult to edit existing templates.

End constant can be uploaded to server or CMS.

Not really accessible... no default alt tag... difficult to parse with a screen reader.

Advantages:

• Easy to use
• Instructors will not require a lot of support

Limitations:

• highly visual.
• Limited number of template
• hard to change the templates
• templates must be build in flash, and therefore requires programming experience to modify.
• Totally inaccessible.
• Hard to make changes on the fly: requires storyboarding.

Bottom line: A good session, but this is not a useful tool, not only because of its lack of accessibility, but also because it lacks flexibility and an intuitive interface.