Forum Discussion

GeorgVolmer's avatar
GeorgVolmer
Community Member
9 months ago

Building a case for Storyline: Seeking your help, experience and examples!

Hi everyone,

I need to showcase the benefits of using Storyline over other tools like Rise. I feel like a lot of projects get pushed into Rise just because the development time and budget seems lower.

In my opinion this leads to courses that feel ... generic, the "same old same old". While the addition of some Storyline blocks has made me feel better about the e-learning I'm producing, I still think I need to advocate for Storyline a lot more.

From my experience, here are some of Storyline's strengths:

  1. Versatile e-learning design: The possibilities are almost limitless with features like triggers, states, layers, variables etc.
  2. Narration: Storyline's ability to add narration adds a significant dimension to learning. It allows concepts to be explained through dual channels of perception (visual and auditory), such as highlighting or showing only what's being discussed.
  3. Control for learners: With features like branching, dials, and sliders, learners have a more interactive and engaging experience.

I believe in the potential of Storyline and will try to make a compelling case. Have you been in a similar situation? How has Storyline made a difference in your projects? Are there specific features that have particularly impressed you or your team?

Your experiences, and especially any project examples that demonstrate Storyline's capabilities, will help me. Real project examples could really make a difference here, I think.

Thanks in advance!

  • I think your list covers the main advantages. Yes, it might take longer to develop in Storyline. But the extra control allows you to provide more true interactions (context-challenge-consequences).

    I'd add this: Storyline can track completion based on a pretest (if the user passes that) or a final assessment (if they don't pass the pretest). So folks don't have to spend time (and frustration) going through a course if they can show they already know the content. 

    • GeorgVolmer's avatar
      GeorgVolmer
      Community Member

      Thank you, Judy! Excellent point. I recall using this approach in a GDPR project a while back - but didn't think to include it in my list. Your reminder is much appreciated, and I'll definitely add it to my advocacy points. Thanks again for sharing your insights!

  • Ange's avatar
    Ange
    Community Member

    Hi Georg,
    Branding. The design features in Rise are limited, unless you want to mess around with the CSS.
    In SL it's a breeze to create a template to exact branding specs.
    Quizzing is limited vs. SL capabilities.

  • Hi Georg,

    I think you listed most of the advantages, from our side, there are not really comparable products, Rise is super simple and easy to learn, but also very limited, that unfortunately means all Rise courses look very similar, and if you need to develop more than 5 courses, it gets boring really fast. On the other hand, Storyline is super powerful and you can do pretty much anything with it. Also the mobile aspect, we had a client - a huge corporation, that used Captivate, because it was responsive, and Storyline was not, after a few months they gathered statistics and only 0.5% (I am not making this up) of their users used LMS on a device that is not a computer or tablet, meaning they went through a lot of pain to create responsiveness for 0.5% of users, and to be honest the experience was not that good either. So they switched to Storyline and are not coming back. I added this example, because that is usually the selling point behind Rise, but if you consider that you can just ask your users to flip you phone horizontally, you realize that you no longer care so much about the "responsiveness" and then the Storyline course is really unbeatable. We are template and course company, not sure if they can be useful for you case, but you can see our examples here:

    https://fastercourse.com/elearning-templates/articulate-storyline/

    and here:

    https://fastercourse.com/course-templates/

    • GeorgVolmer's avatar
      GeorgVolmer
      Community Member

      Hi FasterCourse,
      your real-world example really puts the mobile aspect into perspective. I'll be sure to incorporate the topic of responsiveness when making my case for Storyline. The examples you shared look intriguing – I'll be sure to check them out. Thank you for your answer.