Articulate 360 is an e-learning platform for creating workplace training. Users can build engaging courses with AI-enhanced authoring, simplify collaboration, and quickly share content. A subscription includes robust onboarding resources and access to a community of 1.5M pros.
$1,124
per year
D2L Brightspace
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Brightspace is an academic and corporate learning management platform. It provides core e-learning features, as well as mobile accessibility and granular personalization and analytics insights.
N/A
Pricing
Articulate 360
D2L Brightspace
Editions & Modules
Articulate 360 Standard - Academic - Teams Plan
$1,124
per year
Articulate 360 Standard - Personal Plan
$1,199
per year
Articulate 360 AI - Personal Plan
$1,449
per year
Articulate 360 Standard - Teams Plan
$1,499
per year
Articulate 360 AI - Teams Plan
$1,749
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Articulate 360
D2L Brightspace
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
If you’re new to Articulate 360, you can try it out free of charge for 30 days. After the trial period is over, you can subscribe to one of our packages.
Articulate 360 is available on the Articulate website and through Articulate Authorized Resellers.
Must contact vendor for pricing information. 30-day free trial is available.
For the way that we use it, we embed a lot of SME videos. We call them "talking head videos," but they're really interviewing the experts and having that as something, leveraging those so people can learn, as we say, tips from the pros. So I mean it does that pretty seamlessly. I think the only thing that's a little more time and effort on our part is adding the closed captions. That takes a little more going in and out of Storyline to create a VTT file. I mean, it's like we had to create a reference guide on how to do it because, because it was so complex for having to add closed captions to our embedded video. So if there's a way to make that a little easier, that'd be great. I know everybody would be happy.
If you're an educational institution (K-12, Higher Ed, etc.), this is an amazing tool, and it will provide you all the functionality to support anything you may want and need it to do. If you are looking at Brightspace as a tool for corporate training, I'm not sure exactly how good or bad it will be for you. My guess would be that it likely depends on your organization's size. Along that line, what I can speak to is how we use it for our customized training and in-house professional development/training, and it works fantastically for that. While we primarily use it for normal higher ed coursework, we regularly do training and professional development for all of our employees and I manage those along with our HR department. Because we use it for many other things as well, all of our employees are familiar with the product, which makes our trainings go that much smoother and makes my job that much easier.
So Articulate does very well with usability, so it's a very easy product to use. I've had to onboard an employee who was able to learn the program within a month, I think was amazing, and they were able to create the first course within five months of working at the company. So if that's not a testament to how easy it is to use, I don't know what is.
Allowing users to embed content links from YouTube or Google Drive enables learners to experience a richer lesson.
Providing a powerful editor that allows developers to also include content from Adobe Stock as well as textbook publishers and cloud storage companies gives more power and creative ability to instructors.
Providing scaling for mobile and traditional computer systems ensures students will not have issues on the go.
The customization of home pages and groups enable courses to be used for small training sessions with breakout groups, large courses with separate sections, and even just more engaging courses that present themed icons and logos.
The most hiccups that I've recently experienced are honestly involved with AI and just my trying to learn AI and figure out how we can maximize that for our business case. The AI voiceover is what I'm specifically curious about and trying to learn more. So in regards to the AI, there's still some shuffling needs to be done. SSML that needs to be added for it to read correctly. There is a very large amount of voices and dialects, which I think is beneficial. It was also a little overwhelming in trying to play around with it and find that right part. So just continuing to look through the community and find the guidance that I need to essentially make the audio, make the voiceover work better and read the words correctly. For example, one of my most popular courses that I sell is Record Your Time and it kept reading, it records your time, and I could not figure out how to make those words. We've submitted a ticket, you guys have been very helpful, but we can't really figure out how to make those little nuances work with the complex English language.
One can feel a bit rushed on the Brightspace platform during the log-out period. Security requirements may require this, but it makes end-users more conscious about getting through content than taking notes.
From my experience, there is not a direct connection between the platform and Outlook.
I haven't seen any other platform for developing learning materials that is as comprehensive or as reliable as Articulate has proven to be for our use. Because our group has a number of PowerPoint power users, the PowerPoint integration with Articulate is particularly beneficial.
I would never give any system a perfect score. In the technology environment today we need to be constantly looking at ways to improve the user experience and LMS companies like Desire2Learn need to know that we have options today with other systems and they need to stay current with features and listen to their customers.
Storyline specifically has a bit of a learning curve. There are a lot of creative ways to develop your course, but you have to have a good understanding of triggers and variables. It is nice that there are a ton of webinars that help with these features. The UI is the main selling point because it really is similar to PowerPoint.
Overall, the learning environment works as expected. However, there are plenty of bugs. For example, for a few versions, trying to print out a PDF from the Content screen in several browsers would produce a blank page. We inform D2L support about these issues, most of which are known issues. However, they are very slow to respond. D2L seems to spend more time selling than actually coding and testing their product. Most of the issues are not major -- however, there have been a few that are unbelievable. In fact, this past week we had a sudden issue where the "Submit" button in quizzes would not appear if users had a certain browser/operating system combination. This is a major problem, if students cannot submit their exams! D2L is slow to respond to these kinds of situations, which do occur more often than I would like.
Both students and instructor enjoy the 24-hoiur access. After, all isn't that the point of online learning. As an instructor located in an Eastern time zone state it is great to connect with students located in a Pacific time zone state. I have gotten comments about the early hours I am in the course room grading assignments . . . 4:00 a.m. PST; 7:00 a.m. EST So, it's sleep time for my students and "first cup of coffee" time for me.
I rate the overall support for Articulate 360 with a 9. On the one hand because of the smooth and accurate support from Articulate's support team (usually within 24 hours) and on the other because of the commitment / use of a community (e-learning Heroes) where I have all kinds of insights from other helpful users.
I have had excellent support from Desire2Learn. Any ticket that I submit is acknowledged immediately and the correction is usually almost as quick. We use this for thousands of classes and it is pretty well liked by both faculty and students. We have been using it for almost 4 years now and most of our instructors have become pretty proficient with it.
The online training options given by the online tutorials, forums, and "E-Learning Heroes" community are simply awesome. Examples galore, easy to understand descriptions including step-by-step guides, images, occasionally videos, and the "Articulate Insiders" sub-community give you more materials to learn about Storyline than you are likely to be able to read.
The training provided online did not, necessarily, fit the version of the system that I was using. Screens were somewhat different and not all options were readily available. This could have been due to customization on the part of my institution however, I rather believe it was due to version changes and training materials not yet being updated.
Outside of having to dedicate a powerful enough PC for the installation and having to update Flash in our browsers there really isn't much pain involved in using Articulate. For the most part this is an easy to implement and roll-out product. The installation occurs quickly and smoothly with no additional steps needed.
So I started off, the very first authoring tool I ever used was Captivate over 10 years or 15 years ago, that kind of thing. I think that was just because that was the tool that the team was using at the time. That was my first experience ever with an authoring tool. I found the learning curve to be very extreme, and it was kind of hard to, I mean, you get there, but that was really the first authoring tool that I really had my hands on that I used for a little bit. Then ultimately in that role, I ended up doing much more instructor-led training. So I got further away from self-paced training. Then I wasn't really using it when I knew I was coming back to that online self-study realm. And they actually asked me, what tool is it? What tool do you want to use? I want to go Storyline this time. So I had talked to other companies and organizations, honestly, I've even seen in job openings, they're asking for Storyline experience specifically. So I was like, okay, industry, this would be a smart move for me too. They're asking for specifically storyline.
I have used Blackboard Learn 8 and 9. I am currently learning about Canvas. Blackboard is overall much clunkier and lacks the intuitive feel in some parts of D2L. Its grade book is much harder to control and manipulate than D2L's. Its navigation menu can be more radically modified from the default than D2L's, but this doesn't seem that useful to me. Discussions in Blackboard can be more easily reorganized than in D2L, but no grading of discussions is possible. Blackboard Assignments is a good innovation which allows markup directly in the students' submissions, but it displays student work in a confusing manner that doesn't allow for any customization, and its markup options need further tweaking. Furthermore, no rubrics can be used in Blackboard in any way to grade any kind of work (that I am aware of). Overall, I would choose D2L over Blackboard.
During my first semester working with Desire2Learn the integrated learning management system was more down than up. This meant reconfiguring assignment due dates, frustration for both the instructor, students, and help desk staff. After an upgrade, Desire2Learn has been reliable.
We're just now launching our first program that was created in Articulate 360, so I'd be able to provide you with a better answer in January when the program goes live. We've completed our beta and pilot and so far, we've received great feedback from our learners who have participated in the program. We've set our baseline with this program and look forward to growing our knowledge of Articulate 360 and creating enhanced future programs.
I cannot speak to whether this system is less expensive than the more fully featured Blackboard, but employees are far less efficient, frustrated, and require frequent calls to the help center to set up fairly simple course templates.
I have been asked to consider teaching courses which will be completely online at my current institution. I have done such online courses several times at other universities, but I have decided Desire2Learn is too frustrating and cumbersome to do so. I am now exploring using Google Drive to teach a course online. Otherwise, I will not teach online until required or I find an alternate system.
