I'm looking for a rapid way to develop cost effective business scenarios and came across this product. I wasn't able to find any recent independent reviews. Does anyone know of any?
I looked at these products about a year ago. Two deterents for us at the time was 1) price and 2) although the concept of creating complex scenarios that can map and measure to more than one competency is great, we recognized that we lacked experience and skill level to truely build the scenarios of this magnitude effectively. At the time, the demo CD, showcased how their product could be used to meet a variety of training/industry needs. The best examples, relied heavily on video vignettes - again, cool... but we aren't wildly skilled videographers. Now, a year later, I think we would consider revisiting their product - if I'm not mistaken, they were bringing to market a mid-level product that was to be more reasonably priced and easier to use. I don't know if that ever came to fruition.
I think there are certainly other products out there, that with some creativity, could accomplish a similar result - Lectora, flypaper, and Articulate (of course!!!) I believe the magic is in the design, not the software. I'd rather challenge myself, to fully utlize the tools I already have and save the $$$, then go after a fancy piece of software, that in the end, I may not fully utlize.
I had a phone conversation and a few exchanges with the Director of what they call their "Immersive Learning University." I think SimWriter may be a newer product that what Shelly previewed a year ago. SimWriter is scaled down, but it doesn't require action scripting knowledge and is ostensibly more user friendly. The individual pricing is about the same as the Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio '09 Pro suite. SimWriter does have a free trial download and they do webinar trainings - usually on Tuesdays I believe. I have been hoping to check it out for the past three weeks, but I'm just swamped with other stuff. So - none of what I just said may be helpful, but I share your interest, Richard, in hearing if anyone here has any experience with it. It looks to me like they have a couple of different links and sites with slightly different content on each - but the one I grabbed was: http://www.nexlearning.com/simwriter/
My firm has used SimWriter quite extensively. On the plus side, it is a quite robust product that allows for creating very sophisticated branching scenarios - much more so that the simple branching offered in something like an adobe captivate. It also has a nice MS word export feature - it will spit out a word doc that you can send out to your SMEs for review and then upload all their text changes back into your sim.
On the negative side, the price is somewhat high - I don’t know enough about their new 'lite' version to comment on that. It also has a bit of a steep learning curve if you want to use it for anything more that very simple branching, which means if you don’t plan on creating sims frequently, keeping up a high level of familiarity with it is tough. There are also not too many 3rd party vendors besides Nexlearn that you can outsource development to.
We typically have Nexlearn create our sims, and do simple maintenance in-house using our licenses.
I had a chance to play around with a demo. I am undoubtedly biased but I still prefer BranchTrack (our own product ) for its simplicity, nice looks and extra low learning curve. I'm super interested in feedback from Articulate users and anyone interested in simulations, so let me know if you'd like to learn more.
Also, here are a few links to competing products to make this look less like blatant advertising:
5 Replies
I looked at these products about a year ago. Two deterents for us at the time was 1) price and 2) although the concept of creating complex scenarios that can map and measure to more than one competency is great, we recognized that we lacked experience and skill level to truely build the scenarios of this magnitude effectively. At the time, the demo CD, showcased how their product could be used to meet a variety of training/industry needs. The best examples, relied heavily on video vignettes - again, cool... but we aren't wildly skilled videographers. Now, a year later, I think we would consider revisiting their product - if I'm not mistaken, they were bringing to market a mid-level product that was to be more reasonably priced and easier to use. I don't know if that ever came to fruition.
I think there are certainly other products out there, that with some creativity, could accomplish a similar result - Lectora, flypaper, and Articulate (of course!!!) I believe the magic is in the design, not the software. I'd rather challenge myself, to fully utlize the tools I already have and save the $$$, then go after a fancy piece of software, that in the end, I may not fully utlize.
I had a phone conversation and a few exchanges with the Director of what they call their "Immersive Learning University." I think SimWriter may be a newer product that what Shelly previewed a year ago. SimWriter is scaled down, but it doesn't require action scripting knowledge and is ostensibly more user friendly. The individual pricing is about the same as the Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio '09 Pro suite. SimWriter does have a free trial download and they do webinar trainings - usually on Tuesdays I believe. I have been hoping to check it out for the past three weeks, but I'm just swamped with other stuff. So - none of what I just said may be helpful, but I share your interest, Richard, in hearing if anyone here has any experience with it. It looks to me like they have a couple of different links and sites with slightly different content on each - but the one I grabbed was: http://www.nexlearning.com/simwriter/
My firm has used SimWriter quite extensively. On the plus side, it is a quite robust product that allows for creating very sophisticated branching scenarios - much more so that the simple branching offered in something like an adobe captivate. It also has a nice MS word export feature - it will spit out a word doc that you can send out to your SMEs for review and then upload all their text changes back into your sim.
On the negative side, the price is somewhat high - I don’t know enough about their new 'lite' version to comment on that. It also has a bit of a steep learning curve if you want to use it for anything more that very simple branching, which means if you don’t plan on creating sims frequently, keeping up a high level of familiarity with it is tough. There are also not too many 3rd party vendors besides Nexlearn that you can outsource development to.
We typically have Nexlearn create our sims, and do simple maintenance in-house using our licenses.
I had a chance to play around with a demo. I am undoubtedly biased but I still prefer BranchTrack (our own product
) for its simplicity, nice looks and extra low learning curve. I'm super interested in feedback from Articulate users and anyone interested in simulations, so let me know if you'd like to learn more.
Also, here are a few links to competing products to make this look less like blatant advertising:
http://itystudio.com/
http://simucoach.de/
Does anyone know if SimWriter integrates into Storyline?
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