Articulate is a suite of comprehensive yet easy-to-use set of e-learning development tools. It is used to convert power point presentations directly to create an e-learning course. Articulate Rapid eLearning Studio Professional, known as the market leader in rapid e-learning software, is an integrated authoring suite with applications such as Articulate Presenter, Articulate Quizmaker, and Articulate Engage.

The three applications in Articulate are:

• Presenter: Users can create e-learning courses by adding narration and interactivity to a PowerPoint file.
• Quizmaker: Users can create highly customized Flash-based quizzes and assessments.
• Engage: Users can create highly interactive learning modules.

Articulate is a great tool for rapidly creating flash-based eLearning courses. Many organizations are using this tool for rapid development. A few advantages of this tool are:

• It has the ability to easily convert PowerPoint presentations into eLearning courses that are graphically rich and interactive.
• It has a set of pre-defined interactivities.
• It is easy to create quick assessments – You can use a variety of quiz questions by using Articulate Quizmaker.
• Finally, this tool is ideal for entry level use.

The disadvantages are:

• It has a limited set of interactivities, which are rigid and cannot be customized. For instance if you have a page with 5 pre-defined tabs and you want to add an extra tab, you can’t. The tool doesn’t allow it.
• Navigation, options and Templates are highly limited.
• And it is not ideal for text heavy courses.
• Output will be as good as your ability with using key features of PowerPoint.

Thus Articulate is ideal to use for rapid elearning development, quick assessments and quick briefings – product knowledge, simple scenarios. And with articulate, authors can be comfortable and creative with designing in PPT. Ideal for entry-level use.

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1. The Unique Benefits and Limitations of Flash
2. 5 Key Criteria for the Selection of eLearning Authoring Tools
3. The Unique Benefits and Limitations of Adobe Captivate

Developing a highly interactive course is a mammoth operation. If you’re looking to create highly interactive eLearning course using graphics and animation, then Flash is highly recommended. Most of the online product training, sales training and software training require courses with high interactivity for effective learning experience.

Similar kind of output can be achieved using Articulate Engage. Unlike other authoring tools like Lectora and Captivate, Articulate Engage gives you an option to create interactivities, which will help in creating effective learning experience.

Subject Matter Experts (SME) or Instructional Designers (ID) can use these templates to create storyboards and complete the course in short time, making it cost effective.

Some of the popular instructional approaches that can be used are given below along with the Articulate screen shots.

Clickable Circular Diagram: Shows various elements of a process.

FAQs: Useful as a quick reference for sales training kit.

Glossary Template: Highly visual glossary page for explaining the concept or a term easily.

Guided Imagery: Useful for product training and explaining the parts of a product.

Labeled Graphics: Useful to explain software screens or labeling parts of a product. When the user clicks on the rollover icon (hotspot), the explanation for same is displayed.

Media Tour: Useful for animations and embedding videos.

Process: It explains the process/procedure in a step wise format. Recommended for production or manufacturing processes.

Pyramid: Shows various steps or hierarchy levels in a process.

Timelines: Shows history or process of any activity vis-à-vis time.

Click on Tabs: To provide additional information on a given set of topics.

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