Articulate Studio is a PowerPoint plugin used to develop elearning course content. It includes assessment, on-screen recording, and interactions integrations.
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ProProfs LMS Software
Score 8.9 out of 10
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ProProfs LMS is a learning management system software that is designed
to help instructors create and deliver online training courses. The LMS offers
both businesses and educational institutions comprehensive training solutions
by allowing them to create online courses, complemented by tests, surveys,
polls and even a knowledge base.
Articulate Studio is constantly surprising in terms of what it can do. It is like a "Swiss Army Knife" of functionality. I've used it to build portfolios, whole interactive websites, authoring videos and I often discover novel ways to make it useful on a pretty regular basis. What would be a situation where you would not want to use Articulate Studio? Well, even though you can use it to author video and to publish websites, it's not a replacement for a video editing package or a web platform like WordPress, but there are times when it will do certain things in an astoundingly simple way superior to other tools.
They made it very easy to understand how to add new content to the courses, including images, videos or audio, of course, you are still able to do text-based content as well.
Creating quizzes has never been easier. The ability to add controls to each question and what actions each answer creates, whether an additional question or passing to the next section. Customizing these actions are very easy to learn and add to your course.
Being able to use your own scoring mechanism is awesome! I like SCORM but there are many options to use including a custom one of your own. This ability allows you to pass your students over to a proprietary system that enrolls them in the next course, or use the built-in utilities to provide the next course or quiz, the choice is yours!
The audio editor is awful. Sometimes when you cut a section, it actually takes a different section that you selected. Especially when in zoom mode. You have to then undo the action, and re-do. Also, scrubbing through the audio is difficult. If you're exporting audio, it can glitch during the process. I avoid using the audio editor whenever I can.
After all these years, it's still a buggy program. You can be doing your recordings, and a sudden message appears saying that something went wrong and needs to close. I've done re-installs, contacted support, and I constantly clear the temp folder. Still happens. Also, it's a good idea to export your audio, and there have been times the program freezes up on me, and the audio file (in the .ppta file) gets corrupted and all audio is permanently lost.
The program can get slow when publishing, previewing or opening the audio editor.
The included Engage program is pretty good, but it needs more customization options. And I think they can add more modules that provide a little more engagement.
ProProfs is very bland-looking, rather Web 1.0. They have a very limited-number of templates, and they are not customizable. If the company is making any money, I think they should try to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
ProProfs quizzes are not responsive to devices. A quiz looks exactly the same on an iPhone as it does on a computer screen. Students live in a world where everything they access online is customized to the device they use, but a ProProfs quiz will have small type on an iPhone, and won't allow a zoom by pinching.
Uploading images, audio, and video when making a quiz is a time-consuming task. Takes a lot of clicks. And there's no way to see your own library of uploaded stuff, so when you want to use a previously-uploaded image, you can't just find it in your account and attach it, you have to upload the same image every time. It's tedious.
Other LMSs I've used in the past year, like BookWidgets and iSpring Quiz Maker have a good deal more variety of question types than ProProfs. For example, you can't touch, drag and drop an answer on a blank from a word bank with a ProProfs quiz. Matching-type questions in ProProfs are limited to drop-down menu choices or radio buttons. There's no HTML5 magic at work.
ProProfs support is not bad (response within a day), but they can't explain frequent glitches that occur. Example: Nearly every time a class takes a quiz, there's ONE student who presses "submit" and their answers don't get submitted; instead, the loading circle just keeps rotating and the student panics, and then the student has to press refresh on their web browser, and --sometimes, but not always-- all their responses are erased and they have to take the quiz again. And there's nothing that a teacher can do. It's dreadful. Tell ProProfs about it, and they dodge the bullet because I wasn't able to give them enough info they required (e.g. what kind of phone?, what kind of OS?, what version?, was the device facing North?, etc).
ProProfs UI has not changed significantly in the 4 years I've been using them. I get the feeling that they're not trying hard enough.
This is very useable software even for novice eLearning authoring users. People with some PowerPoint experience should be fine with this software and even Excel!
I've never really had any major issues with the product (Other than the registration loop error)and my ten out of ten rating is based on the assistance I got when we initially set up the extension in Power Point. I found the support folks to be professional, helpful and friendly
ProProfs deserves the best of the best ratings. It makes learners the prime focus of every step of learning, and that’s the greatest thing about it. Besides, arranging and putting different relevant content together is a walk in the park. Everything is so straightforward. If you look at the customization options, they are equally amazing.
Articulate Studio is very much a leader in the e-learning space. It stacks up well against other tools designed to quickly and easily build and update CBTs by managers and super-users versus needing to invest time and effort in dedicated e-learning developers. Process improvement initiatives and cross-functional departments are empowered to develop their trainings themselves and identify areas for future development.
I only see positive impact since it is a very easy to use tool for rapid learning. The only point is to know what is possible to develop using this tool to avoid any kind of frustration afterwards.
Another positive impact is that we don't need a diversified development team. There is no need of technical professionals, and a creative instructional designer is enough to develop effective learning content using Studio.
The third positive impact is that Studio makes possible to realize short-term projects, mainly when there's already a PowerPoint presentation.
