Tool Reviews
29
Overview
Articulate 360 for E-Learning Design (11:07)
Description
Articulate 360 is an authoring program used by instructional designers, e-learning developers, and educators for creating innovative and interactive online learning modules, simulations, and instructional or promotional material. You can sign up with a free sixty day trial, and after that subscribe to a yearly subscription. With an Articulate 360 account, you will have access to several apps that can be downloaded to your desktop, each serving a different purpose, as detailed below.
Rise 360
This is a web-based design tool and by far the most user-friendly out of the Articulate 360 suite because it is web-based and does not require any installation of software and very little training in order to create a course, lesson, or assessment. Rise 360 is used primarily to create responsive courses directly in your web browser in a timely manner.
Storyline 360
This is a desktop authoring tool used to create customized courses and learning modules. Although there is a bit more of a learning curve, it is still fairly intuitive and the interface is designed to be similar to Microsoft powerpoint to make it an easier transition. Storyline is more commonly used for more cumbersome or complex course design, including customized interactions, scenario based activities, and screencast videos with step by step simulation options for demonstrating software or products.
Content Library 360
Provided with each account, the content library contains over five million course assets that users can utilize in their own design projects without any royalties or extra fees. This includes images, templates, videos, characters, and slide templates. The templates in particular are a great way for new users to design professional looking, effective courses with minimal training.
Review 360
This web-based app is where you can publish your courses and invite others to provide feedback. This really brings out the collaborative nature of the program and allows instructors or designers to co-construct courses and lessons.
Articulate 360 Training
This section provides numerous tutorials and instructional videos showing you how to use the various features in Articulate 360. There are recorded webinars and also live webinars that subscribers can access for free.
Justification for Using this Tool
Practice Principle:
Articulate 360 aligns extremely well with many learning theories and instructional design principles. Both Storyline and Rise (the main authoring tools in Articulate 360) offer several opportunities for instructors to create meaningful interactions and formative assessments to practice and test the skills and knowledge learned in the module. This supports the practice principal of effective e-learning design, which states that learners should have ample opportunities to practice the skills learned in the module through multiple question types that can be distributed throughout the learning event (Clark & Mayer, 2011). In Storyline, designers can create scenario based assessments to provide authentic assessment and feedback can be added for all answer options, which also aligns with the feedback and job-mirroring aspects of the practice principle and the worked example principle (Clark & Mayer, 2011).
Learner Control:
In Storyline and Rise, the wide range of user navigation tools like interactive buttons and control buttons for various media allows designers to give learners full control over the pace, navigation, and amount of material that they consume in a learning module, which supports the principle of learner control in effective e-learning design (Clark & Mayer, 2011; Kay, 2001).
Personalization:
Personalization of learning, which encouraged personal, informal tone and teacher presence, is also supported in Storyline where designers can custom record their own voices between slides and interactions, giving test instructions and user prompts with a human voice rather than just text or automated voice (Clark & Mayer, 2011).
Multimedia Principles:
It’s interactivity and multi-modal capabilities with inserting video, audio, graphics, interactive quizzes, and animation allow for the creation of learning modules with most of Clark & Mayer’s multi-media, instructional design principles in mind, particularly the principles of multimedia, modality, and contiguity (Clark & Mayer, 2011). Each module can also be organized into different “scenes” so that large, cumbersome modules can be chunked into smaller, more manageable learning events to avoid cognitive overload and promote the chunking of learning material (Doyle & Fountain, 2012).
Strategies for Use
Strategy 1 – Simulation Practice Exercises
Simulation Practice Exercises through Screencasting (4:51)
Strategy 2 – Promoting Learner Control
Promoting Learner Control through Navigation & Triggers (5:27)
Helpful Resources
Resource 1 – eLearning Articulate 360 Resources
This website offers tons of examples, tips, resources, and articles related to Articulate 360 and other authoring tools. It is a great resource for extra training once you have developed the foundational skills in Articulate.
Resource 2 – eLearning Brothers Articulate Resource Bank
eLearning brothers have a wide range of resources available including training videos, templates, and exemplars. This is quite useful for both novice and advanced users of Articulate.
Resource 3 – Udemy: Learn Articulate 360 from Scratch
This is not a free resource, but for only $15.00, it is a great full resource for a completely new user wishing to learn how to use the authoring tool from the very first steps. Linkedin Learning has a very similar course as well.
References
Articulate Global Inc., (2020). Welcome to Articulate 360. [Web page]. Articulate 360. Retrieved from https://360.articulate.com/
Clark, R.C., & Mayer, R.E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction. San Francisco, CA: Wiley.
Kay, J. (2001). Learner Control. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. (11), 111-127. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011194803800
Doyle, K. E., Fountain, S. B. (2012). Learning by Chunking. Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6
Author
| Submitted by: | Blair Trewartha |
| Email: | Blair.trewartha1@uoit.net |
| Bio: | Blair Trewartha is an educator and instructional designer currently completing his Masters of Education at Ontario Tech University. He holds a B.A. in English/History, a Bachelors of Education degree, and over ten years experience teaching in post-secondary institutions across Ontario. |