Articulate for Authoring
Since writing my reviews of Xerte and eXe, Media Services have started authoring using Articulate. Unlike Xerte and eXe, Articulate is a proprietary desktop system built on top of PowerPoint. Its main advantage is that it combines ease of use for those familiar with PowerPoint (nearly all lecturers at this stage!) with tools for creating quizzes, surveys, interactions and for basic video editing. There are about 20 templates for creating questions including variations on multiple-choice, open answer and drag and drop. Media can easily be incorporated into all question types. Quizzes can be made SCORM compliant. Articulate Engage Interactions allow the creation of specialised pages such as labelled images, pyramids and glossaries. Flash developers can develop their own Engage Interactions using the Engage Software Development Kit. They are encouraged to share them with the Articulate community.
Importantly, the templates allow for considerable flexibility in question design and layout. The standard styles are quite attractive too giving a professional look to learning materials created. Its ease of use, familiarity and special pricing through the NDLR all led me to select Articulate for the latest elearning projects where content would be created by academics.
Articulate is well-supported through its own forums and through active online communities. It hosts the Rapid eLearning Blog which has regular, practical tips for articulate developers. Its Community Showcase highlights work from members around the world.
Using Xerte, I grew to like web-based development for team projects, this has the advantage of a single master version that everyone works on. With Articulate we are back to version control management with multiple versions on different PCs (and it does not run on a MAC). Apart from that I am very pleased with our experiences with Articulate.
Add comment August 24th, 2010
