Articulate Storyline is a learning content creation platform. It provides prebuilt and customizable content, along with gamification capabilities. Articulate emphasizes user-friendliness, including mobile accessibility. It is offered on a perpetual license.
In an office where you're planning to do a large amount of module-based training, Articulate Storyline will prove useful. A consideration to make, however, is whether your team members focused on training design will have the capacity to learn the software enough to create interesting and effective training modules. The basic functions can be simple, but the more advanced capabilities of the software take considerable effort to master and employ to create the more visually appealing presentations/modules you see in much of the promotional materials. If you have a small training team (or even without anyone dedicated specifically to training and development), Storyline is not a wise choice as the cost and effort required to fully make use of the software would be far too much of a commitment to make it worthwhile.
Well, Edmodo is the best e-learning platform. Even you do not have to meet your audience face to face. And there are tons of free courses in different subjects. Now everyone can join them easily and increase their general knowledge or in specific subjects. I am individually using Edmodo for creating groups for my students and our staff members. There are plenty of tools for doing different kinds of work. If you are working with pupils, then you can add their parents to the group and they can only view their child's grades. You can create assignments for your members and you can grade them using Edmodo.
Storyline integrates with the Canvas LMS fairly seamlessly. There have been a few glitches, but for the most part, the interactions we have created will play directly in the Canvas LMS.
Storyline is great for creating short drag and drop interactions for self-reviews or even graded assignments. Its many options for quizzes such as "answer reveal" or using tabs help the student get a different perspective on the content rather than just an "A, B, or C" answer.
Storyline is great for tutorials or training sessions. There are many options to help guide the learner (or employee) through a process. it is not just linear, but you can branch the slides based on the answers. A great way to engage the learner or employee.
Edmodo syncs with my Google Drive, making the sharing of assignments, handouts, pictures, and videos incredibly easy. Because I can store often-used materials in my Edmodo library, I can find them easily for the next time I am working on that unit.
The quizzes are easy to set up and they can be used again, so if I need to do a check for understanding on a particular topic in multiple classrooms, or use the same baseline data collection quiz for more than one semester, I need only create the quiz once.
The calendar feature for Edmodo allows me to plan my lessons days, even weeks ahead. I can keep assignments hidden until the day I plan to teach them, and if I need extra time for a lesson within a unit, adjusting the due dates is a simple drag-and-drop operation.
I wish that you could customize the UI ribbons to bring features you use frequently to the front and to hide options you rarely use.
It would be great if there was a way for non-technical collaborators (SMEs, management, etc) to be able to open a *.story file directly and provide comments. You currently have to publish the course, load it to the LMS, update the LMS, and then hope that users can find it in the LMS. A Storyline Viewer/Previewer standalone application would be awesome.
The price is too high for freelancers to purchase and use. I no longer contract and work exclusively for the firm, but even with our resources, the high price limits the number of licenses available to use.
Although Edmodo has a nice online assessment feature, it lacks in critical areas. It is difficult to attach diagrams or charts to questions. This can be done, but they are displayed in a module which pops up in front of the question. This thus hides the questions when looking at the diagram, picture, etc.
Questions can be randomized in Edmodo when students take an assessment, which is a nice feature. Answer choices, however, cannot be randomized.
Edmodo could use a much better WYSIWYG editor. It can be difficult to incorporate equations or subscript for instance.
The analytical data offered in assessments is decent, but it would be good if the following was added: it would be good to see which answers where most commonly missed by students; it would be good if more class data was given, such as average, median, low scores.
Other LMS platforms do a much nicer job of incorporating these feature directly into the question.
You are unable to add attachments to Calendar postings. This would be a very useful feature.
Updates can get lost after a while, and are difficult to search for. Once you have a large numbers of postings, finding older postings, which very well could be assignments or assessments, can be tedious for both students and parents. Even with using the built in filter feature, this is certainly an area I could see improvement being made.
Although Edmodo has a nice Folder feature to store your materials as a teacher, it is painstaking to use once you have a large number of items in a folder. The drop and drag feature is slow, and doesn't always stick. There is no subfolder feature as well. So, although you can organize materials, other LMS platforms make it much easier to organize and share you materials with students, parents, and other colleagues.
We are moving away from the standalone eCourse model, so depending upon when that shift happens, we might choose not to renew since we won't be supporting eCourses built in Articulate Storyline anymore. As long as we are still selling and supporting those eCourses, we will continue to renew the licenses we have.
Edmodo is a LEARNING tool. Not "one more thing" I have to use or integrate. It was my one stop shop for everything for my classes. More importantly, I was able to watch my students grow. My students who were timid, and quiet, became my discussion leaders. Students who didn't do their homework, never missed an assignment once I started doing "e-tickets" and discussion groups. Everyone felt they had a voice, which made our classroom community that much stronger.
The basics are easy to learn but you won't get really robust activities from using just the basics. However, if you can invest the time in learning how to use all of Storyline's features, you'll have tremendous learning development power at your fingertips. I do have to say, though, that there is a beautiful logic to how everything in Storyline works. Once you learn a few of the advanced features, you can learn them all because there's a similar underlying logic. The interface is also very appealing and friendly.
When I was given 100 studnets it was no problem. When I was given another 60 it was still no problem. I didn't really have much more work to do. I definately didn't have to make copies or look for old assignments for students who joined a school later than traditional one's. When students missed or were sent home, they could still be part of the learning community.
They are support-superstars and the software they use for support is excellent too (I don't know what it is). The model they use for support should be followed by all companies. It is a conversation/discussion forum model that shows everyone's questions in a knowledge base capacity so you can get the help you need in a speedy way.
Support through Edmodo is excellent. The communities are a really great way to get fast help because they are actively monitored, and responses are posted by other community members and the support staff. Users can also email Edmodo with suggestions, and in my experience, an Edmodo support person will respond with additional information or, at the very least, with an acknowledgement of the suggestion.
I love the fact that both a demonstration AND text version of the tutorials are available. Our firewall was blocking the demos until I requested my company allow them! Having the text version available still enabled me to learn from the tutorials. They are very well done and informative, and there is a tutorial for just about anything you need to learn to do with Storyline. I have always been more than satisfied with the support and training available to us for all Articulate products and I love the community!
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.
Plan a little extra time to let them play with the platform with fun assignments. This made them comfortable submitting work, finding items, communicating with me or each other
Articulate Storyline is the only authoring tool we have used with our LMS to date. We are seeing different platforms now, as opposed to LMS platforms. And, many of those have their own content. However, we will always need to create/author our own because of the nature of what we do and how we do it. I'm a big fan!
I actually utilize Google Classroom over Edmodo in most of my school functions. I still use Edmodo as a coach and club adviser but prefer Google Classroom as a classroom teacher. Google Classroom offers everything that Edmodo does but seems to be more efficient, particularly for our school as our district has paid for Google apps and each student has their own Gmail account. Additionally, Google Classroom allows students to access Google Docs and edit in real time where Edmodo has some limitations in that regard. Finally, students generally have stated that they prefer Google Classroom as the smartphone application is easier and more dynamic.
It is easy to train new users and manage content. Being able to import older projects and PPT files makes it very easy to use for a lot of "moonlighters" in our department.
Allows for on-demand training that is accessible to anyone in the organization instantaneously.
Heavily reduces travel expenses by eliminating the need for in-person training classes.
Gives my department creative liberties in designing content that can be customized to each and every subject/business group in the organization. No two courses are ever the same.
Definitely better customer service! Once the parents figured out the tool and students were proficient with it. It was an excellent way to communicate student's strengths and weaknesses in their learning.
Increased employee efficiency. Especially since teachers can share assignments easily too. And, as I've referred to many times, the grading feature is a huge time saver!
A negative impact is we have had some cyberbulling. But, used the blocking features and handled it with face-to-face interaction with the students in question and their families.
