Content Authoring Tool Preferences
I'm doing a little bit of research here and asking for input and recommendations. We currently use Camtasia as our main content authoring tool with Captivate also available if we need it. I wanted to know what your thoughts are on these tools for integration with Bridge and what other tools you would recommend, and why.
We like what we are getting, but we want to make sure we aren't missing out on features that would help us improve what we are using in the courses we create on Bridge. Thanks in advance for your recommendations and responses.
Comments
11 comments
Hi Randy! Like you, I used Camtasia and Captivate as my main tools up until about a year ago. Then I purchased Storyline and I love it! I still use Camtasia for videos, however, Storyline has some features to allow the creation of interactive videos that I'm excited to try. As far as integration with Bridge, none of the tools directly integrate with Bridge. Your SCORM file is uploaded and the course works as it would in the SCORM cloud. As part of our transition to Bridge, I uploaded nearly 100 files that we created internally. They were created in all 3 tools and I didn't have problems with the courses scoring or displaying. I like Storyline 360s review platform and it has made my job a lot easier when I am getting feedback from SMEs. Also, if the content is likely to change soon, or is a one-time use the Authoring features in Bridge work very well. I recently build a 3 part course with videos (that I edited in Camtasia). And it turned out really nicely-- kind of a mini series, video, mini-quiz, etc. Let me know if this sparks any questions! -Katie
Katie,
Thanks for the response. My team and I love using Camtasia but not so much Captivate. We have been considering Storyline and doing some research on it. Would you mind giving me some specifics on why you would choose (have chosen) Storyline over Captivate?
Randy
Randy, if you go with Storyline 360, there are some major benefits. The review process is extremely cool. Also, the layout is more like an Office product so it might be easier for some people to pick up. In addition, 360 has a huge library of assets that are modern and fit with our branding. So, it really makes development a lot more seamless. The whole program is more modern and helps develop courses that look and feel current. With 360 you can easily share templates and slides with other team members. However, it is more expensive that Captivate. Captivate now includes VR abilities so that is unique and not supported in Storyline at this time. And, I think Storyline only added mobile recently, so for some that may have been a deal breaker. For some reason, I was also under the impression that Storyline could not do simulations (graded and ungraded) however I was incorrect and Storyline does now have this ability. I took an ATD course last fall to get up to speed on Storyline and that has helped a lot.
Perfect. Just what I needed to hear. Do we need the whole suite or could we get what you described with just Articulate?
They package it now-- we have Articulate 360 and here's a link https://articulate.com/360
I'm not sure if you can buy it separate, but I use Storyline 360, Review 360 and the Content Library 360. I haven't dabbled in Rise 360... yet.
We also use Camtasia. I have thought about looking into something more robust but it seems we never have time. Thanks for the tips Katie! Does storyline allow for a better transcript download than what we have with Camtasia? We caption every video and though we try to get our content authors/SMEs to record from a script when they make a video, they don't always do so. If they have a script, we can easily include it. If they don't, we can only download the ugly .SRT file and then convert it to .TXT.
We like to include the transcript not only for accessibility but also for our ESL learners and for those who prefer text to video. Any thoughts on tools from that aspect?
Thank you,
Amy
Hi Amy, that's a great question. I don't have an answer yet as to what Storyline can do with a transcript. However, we house all of our videos in Stream (I think it comes with our Office 365 package). And, Stream generates a transcript when a video is uploaded. I have exported the transcript before to pull the file. My SMEs and myself don't always use a script. I know-- we should and sometimes I have to work with what I've got/have time for. What I've done in Bridge is uploaded a video with out captions and then provided an alternative link to go to Stream and watch with captions. If you are using a SCORM file from Camtasia with quizzing in your Camtasia file that would not work though.
Hi Katie,
We always have the captions, it's the text transcript that looks ugly. It would be great if we could download a .TXT file that didn't have all of the ugly timestamps!
Thanks,
Amy
Katie and Amy,
Have either of you use Studio under Admin>Tools (it is something that has to be granted in permissions to anyone that isn't an Admin)? That is what we use for transcriptions. It is pretty good and allows us the ability to go in and easily make edits in case it interpreted/misunderstood a spoken word (for example, we use a lot of acronyms that we pronounce as words and the transcription always comes out spelled wrong). If you haven't used it, I would recommend trying it as a comparison and see what you think.
Good luck,
Randy
Randy,
Yes, we use Studio very frequently. The issue is that if you download transcripts they still download as ugly, time-stamped files. I like to provide clean scripts for those who would rather read the content. It would be great if there was a program (and there might be!) that could download the .SRT files and convert them to some sort of text that was easy to read.
Best,
Amy
Does anyone have the need to embed course content that is in PDF format? Bridge does not currently support embedding of PDFs and quite frankly the PPTs appear too small in the course. Does anyone have any workarounds or solutions to creating courses with content from Word, Excel, PDFs that do not affect the quality as when converting to image?
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