Thank You Articulate For Saving My Butt in ECI 716!

May 05, 2011

G F
By G F

Just wanted to publicly say "Thank You" to Articulate for an excellent product and great community support forums. I was able to complete my ECI 716 web based instruction (WBI) assignment in three days, compared to the two+ months effort I did with Adobe e-Learning Suite 2 which I had to abandon. You see, there were major issues in using Adobe Captivate with PowerPoint 2010, and its e-Learning Workflow module was broken right out of the box where I wanted to use Captivate and Dreamweaver together. Anyhow, I used PowerPoint to create my mockup, and then ported over to Articulate to create a Learning Management System version to upload to the university's Moodle system. I also used Audacity and JetAudio Basic to merge music and narration together, which was included in my Articulate course. After working with NCSU's tech support on some Moodle bugs with the SCORM/AICC package (e.g. LMS output from Articulate) and the "visible" dates for the course, the Articulate-produced course worked like a charm.

A little background: I am an adult student at NCSU on their e-learning program. ECI 716 course is WBI Design, and the students were to use Dreamweaver, an open-sourced web design tool, or any other e-learning development tool  to create a WBI. I wanted to instead create a SCORM course so that I can test Moodle, and the professor was kind enough to allow me to do this for my final product.

If you wish to see my v1.0 of my course, feel free to go to the NCSU Moodle web site provided below. Please note that I did this in 3 days, with no training or experience on Articulate, with a lot of sleepless nights to try to get everything working in meeting the May 2 deadline. There are a lot of improvement areas for my course, so I would love to receive any comments or criticisms concerning my WBI. Attached is the instructions on how to access this course. Please note that on the Discussion Thread, you have to click on "Start New Discussion" and post your answers or feedbacks ... I forgot to add that in my instructions.

Thanks and enjoy...

References:

* NC State University e-Learning Graduate Certificate Program: http://distance.ncsu.edu/programs/graduate-certificate-in-e-learning

* My WBI (available until May 21, 2011): no longer available...

P.S. Unfortunately, I had to uninstall Articulate since I used the 30-day trial and I cannot afford to purchase it at this time (already spent the money on Adobe's product). It was fun while it lasted...

4 Replies
David Anderson
almost 13 years ago05/05/11 at 8:18 pm (UTC)

That's some awesome feedback George--Thank you! Building a one-hour, 55-slide course in 3 days is amazing--don't be surprised if some folks contact you for contract work

For a course built under such tight deadlines, there isn't much I would say you should or could have done differently. You have a great, conversational pacing to your narration; it's natural and easy to listen to. The audio might have been recorded a little "hot" but it's not distracting.

Also thought your opening tunes were a refreshing alternative to the usual corporate bumper music we often hear.

So what's next for you? Is there a particular area of elearning or instructional design you're pursuing?

Thanks again for sharing your story!

G F
almost 13 years ago05/05/11 at 9:43 pm (UTC)

Thanks David. I am taking the e-learning courses to have a formal understanding about e-learning for my job ... I have become the de facto architect with the NC Justice Academy (NCJA) for their proposed e-learning virtual campus system. Due to budget cuts, a lot of the feasibility study and architecture are being performed in-house, so I took it upon myself to take the online graduate certificate program to learn more about e-learning. I have the Virtual Campus Request for Information (RFI) we had posted late last year, if you wish to see it (and I can post it on this thread), and the project was just approved for Request for Proposal (RFP, e.g., formal vendor solicitation procurement request).

A little clarification about my "2+ months timeframe" I mentioned earlier: ECI 716 is on formal WBI Design, not on actual WBI developer tools usage. So I had to do research on the subject I chosen for the WBI, learn the WBI tools, and put the design into action while working on my WBID document, all in a single semester. The textbook used was "Web-based Learning: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation" by Davidson-Shivers and Rasmussen (ISBN 0-13-081425-3). I actually completed Adobe e-Learning tutorials and did some prototypes in Captivate and Dreamweaver while working on my WBID and putting the mockup together in PowerPoint. However, when I had to abandon this track (despite multiple workarounds tried), I started to use Articulate under the recommendation from one of the NCJA course developers who had used it in the past. To say the least, I was honestly petrified that I may not be able to provide a working product by May 2, which was actually a week later (May 2 was for peer review, April 25 was for professor's review but she allowed me to slip a week without significant penalty).

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