Articulate Studio - Effective, if a little buggy
June 15, 2018
Articulate Studio - Effective, if a little buggy
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Articulate Studio
We use Articulate Studio to quickly create eLearning courses related to our Release Training. Often, we have a matter of days to create a full training with the updates of all our products, and we create these at a rate of one every 4 weeks, if not more often. Articulate Studio, being an add-on for PowerPoint, allows us to develop slides quickly and narrate them to create an engaging course, complete with quizzing.
- Easy learning curve. Just some button clicks for recording narration, syncing animations, and adding annotations.
- They made some fairly recent improvements to how you sync animations and add annotations. With the timeline, you can manually move the timing around. Much better than the earlier task of having to just re-do it from the beginning and hope you get the timing right.
- If you're using Studio in the Articulate 360 subscription, you can easily review the course before it publishes.
- The included Quizmaker program is just great. Simple to use, but you can make a varied mix of questions, and the customization options are great.
- You can add background music in slides, which is pretty great in certain situations.
- 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.
- It has shortened our training times significantly and allowed us to schedule the sales and support floors in a much more flexible manner compared to classroom instruction.
I actually use all 3 products, as they each have their strong points. For Release Training, Studio is our best choice because of the short turnaround times. That said, we use Camtasia to create the video demos needed, and insert the finished mp4 video into Studio. Studio has been great at supporting the included videos.