Making Sense of PowerPoint Pandemonium (Sep 11) By Mark Simon September 14, 2011 Five years ago eLearning developers were scratching their heads, trying to figure out whether to buy Articulate Presenter or Macromedia Breeze (which is now Adobe Presenter). Both were PowerPoint (PPT) add-ins, had nearly identical menu choices, had nearly identical features, and both produced nearly identical eLearning output. Today, things are even worse. There are now three PPT-based eLearning tools that not only look alike, but are all named Presenter. But wait, there’s more: How about a new PPT-based tool that looks just like the others (but it’s not named Presenter) and it costs far less than the other tools. Now we must figure out whether this new lowball application can handle highbrow eLearning lessons – and then we need to look at all four to figure out which one is right for our specific environment. In this article, I evaluate each tool, outline its features, and then list some of the pros and cons for each application. I’ll also offer my opinions about the environments and situations where each tool will work the best. My aim is to help you decide which tool will work best for you on your next project. Please note that I took all prices in this article from the respective publisher Web sites on September 8, 2011. The publishers of these tools often offer them in various combinations or bundles at various prices, some of which may be lower than what I’ve shown here. Therefore, consider the price information as one point of comparison only, and understand that, under some circumstances, you may be able to get any particular tool at a lower price. Articulate Presenter/Articulate Studio Tweet-length Summary: Great package with a lot of useful tools, but the competition is very close behind. Is the price way too much? Articulate has several components that you can buy separately or in various bundles. (Prices shown are full price/sale price.) Table 1. Articulate products and prices Component Price Description Articulate Presenter $799/699 Articulate’s core eLearning development application for creating full-featured eLearning lessons, minus QuizMaker assessments and Engage interactions Articulate QuizMaker $699/599 Electronic learner quiz/assessment tool Articulate Engage $499/399 A set of Flash-based learner interactions that can be inserted as pages in the lesson or used in tabs at the top of the eLearning “skin” Video Encoder Free Video-to-Flash converter that is included for free as a part of the Studio Standard or Studio Professional bundle Features While Articulate has a number of features that are unique and helpful in certain situations, its big edge over the competition is the overall package. No other tool has more options for interactions and visual enhancements than Articulate, and if you buy one of the Suite bundles, you can rest assured that you are getting the most robust eLearning development tools available for PPT-based tools. The two features that usually make Articulate stand out from the rest of crowd are Engage and QuizMaker. Engage is a module that contains several pre-packaged Flash learner interactions, and as any experienced Instructional Designer will tell you, the learner interactions are often the biggest thing that separates a good learner experience from a bad one. Of the tools reviewed in this article, Articulate is the only one that has such a feature and you can usually tell an Articulate-based eLearning lesson by the presence of one of these interactions. QuizMaker is a very robust assessment or survey tool that allows you to test learners in just about any manner. There are also many learner remediation options available (custom replies based on answers, navigation options based on answers, and so on) and you can capture all the learner answers nicely in your LMS via QuizMaker’s compatibility with SCORM and AICC. Articulate’s audio recorder and sync tools are excellent, and they raised the bar with Articulate ’09 when they added an annotation feature that allows you to overlay graphic pointers and shading on top of your slide page during the narration. Articulate also includes a branching feature that allows you to create branching scenarios in your learning content. You can, of course, build branches through a few clever PowerPoint links instead of using this built-in feature, but that band-aid method has many drawbacks so it is very nice to have a built-in, fully supported feature for branching. Articulate’s slide controls allow you to create multi-level navigation for learners by specifying level numbers for each slide. This creates a nested display of topic titles in the learner’s contents bar, which is a very helpful thing when you have 50 or more slides. Instead of 50 topic titles appearing at the same level in the contents bar, the learner can view a limited number of section titles and then the individual topics indented under each section title. Finally, Articulate’s publish feature allows you to publish to several media formats and it has fully compliant output for SCORM or AICC. Beyond that, Articulate publishes to CD if you want a “vanilla” output without all of the extra XML files for SCORM and AICC, and it will publish as an MP3 podcast, which results in a concatenated audio file using all audio recordings in your lesson. It is also very helpful that Articulate publishes to an MS Word file, which gives you the option of distributing a storyboard of your lesson to any interested parties. Summary: Articulate positives • Engage interactions can help learner engagement with eLearning lessons. • The QuizMaker tool is rock solid and can create just about any assessment that you need. • Support forums are excellent and the staff members at Articulate are serious thought leaders in the community. There are a wide variety of options for issue resolution, although you will need a credit card for any live support (telephone or chat). • Its annotation features can be very helpful for emphasis on an otherwise static page. Summary: Articulate negatives • There is limited ability to duplicate PowerPoint animations and no capability to duplicate PowerPoint slide transitions. • Its performance is extremely slow, especially with publishing and any operations that involve Engage or QuizMaker. • You cannot copy and paste with Windows clipboard during publishing. On the surface, this is just an annoyance, but combined with the horrible performance of Engage and QuizMaker, it makes one wonder about the engineering stability of the system. • Articulate Studio ’09 was released in September 2008, which was ages ago in the World of eLearning. By contrast, Lectora Snap! has had two version releases within the past six months, and iSpring went from version 5.0 to 5.7 in just a little over a year. Adobe Presenter Tweet-length Summary: Pioneer of PPT-based eLearning is no longer the front-runner but is a respectable tool and it is now at a respectable price. For just $500, you can get the stand-alone version of Adobe Presenter, which includes a highly capable quiz tool and many of the same features of Articulate. This is a drastic difference from several years ago, when you had to spend $5,000 to get it because the price of Macromedia Breeze (the original Adobe Presenter) was $1,000 and you could only buy it in bundles of five applications at a time. Table 2. Adobe eLearning products and prices Component Price Description Adobe Presenter $500 Adobe’s eLearning development tool includes their quiz tool application that creates narrated eLearning lessons using PowerPoint as the base for the development Adobe eLearning Suite $1,799 Includes Presenter, Adobe Captivate, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, X Pro, and Audition. (Wow!) Features In many ways, you can think of Adobe Presenter as the vanilla version of Articulate Presenter. It contains the same basic features as Articulate Presenter and QuizMaker, but it doesn’t have some of the flashy features such as annotations or easy-to-use templates for Flash interactions. As they have done since the beginning, Adobe claims that Presenter has the “best-in-class” conversion to Adobe Flash. They own Flash and they own Presenter, so it would be natural to assume that they have the best Flash output. However, since there is certainly no noticeable difference to the end-user, this advantage is somewhat questionable. However, Adobe does have a big advantage with the ability to work with ActionScript 3, which is the new foundation for Adobe Captivate simulations. Since Captivate is part of the tool set for many eLearning developers, this compatibility is very important – mostly because the other PPT-based eLearning tools require workarounds to get Captivate to work. You cannot overlook the importance of Adobe’s packaging of Presenter with a number of very impressive cousins in the Adobe family. The bundle includes Captivate, along with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, X Pro, and Audition. And some little features, such as the ability to publish to PDF (another cousin in the Adobe family), can be helpful to a serious eLearning developer. As with Articulate, I have to say that this rapid eLearning development tool has not been rapidly developing in terms of exciting new enhancements. In fact, they still have the same bug with the publishing process, the one that takes over the Windows clipboard and prevents you from doing copy/paste while publishing is running. In addition, it was disappointing to see that Presenter would not initially install on my Windows 7, Office 2010 computer because it didn’t think I had PowerPoint installed. The problem was that I changed my Start Button menus so that all my Microsoft apps were in the same folder, but this didn’t throw off any of the other tools.