Articulate 360

The sheer amount of options and customization. Templates are there for your use, to help make things easier, but everytjing can be customized down to what you want and need. My favorite are all of the interactive elements to track engagement and understanding. Some are little features, like making sure users open information, or turn a card to learn, others are more interactive like hotspots on pictures that appear for users to learn as they decipher. There are endless options.

Ease of use has been our greatest asset - it is easily embeddable in our college's learning management system to allow faculty of various roles to easily engage in simple training without getting bogged down in a feature or task heavy system such as we use for formal online courses.

Storyline is my favorite product. It allows for a wide range of creative applications and the features such as triggers, branching, and AI integrations make it very engaging for learners. Combining Rise courses with embedded Storyline blocks is one of my favorite ways to create gamification into e-learning courses.

The vast customization and options with Articulate comes with a steep learning curve. Especially if you want to sway outside of templates and create more original content. Things like animations, moving characters, custom images, and embedded other tools and resources takes time to learn and complete. It takes quite a bit of time to understand how things work and to get them to do what you want.

The product is outstanding, but we have found a best practice of requiring multiple support personnel to ensure trainings built with Articulate are at their best - it may be that a single employee could manage this, but it's likely best employed by a team of folks carrying expertise in instructional design, editorial, and UI design along with technical back-end knowledge of how Articulate interfaces with whichever platform you embed it within.

The only weaknesses I can point out are with the admin side. We have a very small team but even so we should be able to have more than two admins. We experienced a turnover in our department and it was very difficult to get the person's content moved over to myself after they left. The support team should have a way to move content from one person to another in these cases. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a way for there to be more than one owner of content once its created. You can allow someone else to edit, but there is only one owner allowed, which can make publishing difficult as you have to transfer ownership in order to do that.