Articulate 360 vs. Cornerstone OnDemand

I am not a fully trained instructional designer, but I found the user experience to be enjoyable. I have crafted my own revision of a course using Articulate 360 and while the process was lengthy, I found edits and changes to be relatively easy to implement. I also had a great deal of fun making tweaks, organizing and adding imagery. I think with regard to creating online courses/products for students to utilize, this is a great program and serves several levels of instructional design well (from me being brand new to this, to my supervisor who is newly certified, up to a longtime LD). I don't know that this is wholly relevant to courses that are live, be they in-person or virtual (Zoom webinars for example). Most of the material created in Articulate 360 tends to sit on the side of an on-demand, at-your-own-pace as far as coursework is concerned. A live course with an instructor, while it could be utilized in a live setting, the way it would be used I am unsure would be as dynamic or worthwhile as other more traditional options.

I feel Cornerstone OnDemand is a great solution for companies that have a large amount of compliance training that needs to be assigned and closely tracked. The features of dynamic groups (based on specific user criteria) allows you to target very specific audiences. The assignment functionality gives you great flexibility on when the assignment runs and how often, and also provides many options for due dates (static date or dynamic date - x days from hire date, date assigned, etc.). This has allowed us to have a clear and consistent user experience for both our newly hired employees and our seasoned employees.

Incentivized

• Rise is clean and professional. It looks polished to users and is easy for learners to follow.
• They have outstanding support.
• Storyline allows you to create some very engaging intricate interactive learning.
• Generally, their products are user friendly.
• They are considered the Gold standard in elearning authoring.
• Their courses can be read on phones, tablets computers. etc.
• They also have a powerpoint add in for making really nice slides.
• Their review tool, allows you to easily send the courses to reviewers who can update in course.

Incentivized

• Automatic recurring assignments are easy to get that refresher training out without needing to assign it fresh each time.
• Reporting 2.0 makes it easy to write and share your reports with just selected filters. Making it easy for people receiving it to just change what they need to see.
• Learning Admin Console makes it easy to peek at what is going on in your portal and open up connected reporting when needed.
• Success Center is a great resource for getting peer answers to questions and learning about the releases and suggesting changes that should be added to the roadmap.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see more variety in the types of interactions available. The ones that exist now (hot spot, drag n' drop, flip cards, etc.) are useful, but it would be nice to have more options without having to build something custom in Storyline to pull over. For example, I'd like a more elaborate sorting activity, customizable drag and drop activity, game options such as crosswords, options that allow user response, and more variety in the quizzing and assessment.
• The built-in branching scenario feature requires a bit of trial and error. I'd like to see a snapshot, at-a-glance view of the scenario so it easier to see where the branching is, or where its missing.
• The built-in assessment features are pretty limited - the Knowledge Check block has only multiple choice, multiple response, fill in the blank and basic matching. There is the option to pull in a test bank which is great, but it would be great to have more options built-in without having to develop something more elaborate in Storyline.

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be.
• I would like to see more OSHA related courses.
• At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform.

Incentivized

Articulate 360 is an essential tool in our organisation's workflow. The money that we make through its use, far outweighs the cost of renewing our licenses. Articulate 360 has exposed us to new clients that we may not have otherwise encountered if we did not subscribe to the Articulate services.

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

I rate the overall usability of Articulate 360 ​​with an 8, because of the many possibilities the software offers me. The software ensures that almost anyone without knowledge of coding can develop an interactive online course in a fairly simple and pleasant way.

Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

Pages do not load quickly. Often times any action or selection of a box, drop down, check, pretty much ANY Javascript interaction causes the whole entire page to load/reload/start doing something in the background. This makes a nightmare for having to mass edit courses or upload ILT sessions. It's the one of the archaic web designs they use that really bugs me as an admin and makes working in the portal at times intolerable and insufferable

Incentivized

It took forever to get someone to respond--either by email or by phone--directly to a pricing and licensing question. It is unfortunate that a company that has such potential as a streamlined course building/authoring tool not only missed the boat with service but also proves itself to be all fluff and no substance.

Incentivized

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.

Incentivized

It is pretty straight forward and easy to implement is you are already creating eLearning. If you have old courses created in other versions of Articulate I recommend you update them to the new version even though it is not necessary (especially From Storyline3 to 360) but if you don't you may find difficulty opening and keeping things straight

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

Adobe Captivate has a ton of incredible functionality. You're able to fully customize user experiences through interactive elements, buttons, transitions, hiding and activating various elements, and so on. But overall Captivate is insanely difficult for someone new to the tool to learn. Most of what I learned about Captivate, I had to do by trial and error or by watching Paul Wilson's YouTube videos. I find Articulate 360 to be far more intuitive

Incentivized

The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected

Incentivized

It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.

• I am an independent user so far so no ROI; however it has clearly made a positive impact on my course as my students love the clear navigation interface and know exactly where to find content.
• On point to consider is that it has no forum option on its lesson option so this hinders some asynchronous users from interacting with others on the course.
• Users have expressed many positive feedback from using Articulate 360 which increases productivity and engagement.

Incentivized

• We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this.
• The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings.
• Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting.

Incentivized