Written by Dick CarlsonArticulate has created what looks like an online LMS in what they’re calling “Articulate Online” — they say you can track how employees, customers and prospects interact with your e-learning courses, assessments and presentations.
Their bullets are:
- Don’t need an expensive or complicated LMS
- Everyone can get results without the usual hassles
- Affordable, all-inclusive plans starting at only $199/month
I’m watching a little three-minute demo from Alli Star, a Product Evangelist. It’s a nice clean screen, the audio is clear, and even the animations are only a little bit jerky.
You can pull in PPT content in a couple of clicks — converting to SWF — and then you’re asked if you want to manage the content. You can launch directly from the web, get reports, share it, set permissions, or email an invite.
At least in the demo, it seemed to work very cleanly. (I’m guessing they weren’t doing the demo over a typical net connection, but I’d love to be proven wrong.)
The reports are very clean and readable, with percentages and some pretty colored bars.
Questions I’ve got:
- Where does this data live?
- Can I buy a server version, so I don’t have to go outside my firewall?
- How can I customize reports?
- What other formats can be imported?
- How does this system play with the more traditional LMS world?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the post, Dick, and glad to hear you were impressed by Articulate Online. We’re very proud of it!
To your point about the “typical net connection,” we did create the demo you’ve linked to using the live Articulate Online production server. I’d invite you to create a free 30-day trial and test out the speed yourself.
I’ll attempt to answer your questions, too:
1. All data reside on the Articulate Online servers, which are fully backed up and replicated for immediate fall-over in case of primary server failure. We do, of course, actively scale our hosted environment, including security and performance.
2. AO is currently offered only as a hosted solution, though we haven’t ruled out a future licensed offering.
3. Standard reports allow you to report on any of the tracked data (content item views, quiz scores and responses, guestbook answers, user or group activity, and much more), and you can export data to CSV or XML for further manipulation and analysis.
4. If I understand the question correctly, AO supports content created by Articulate Presenter or Articulate Quizmaker only (and direct publishing from either application to AO). Note that you can embed any Flash movies or other file attachments or Web Objects (live Web sites or custom HTML) via Presenter.
5. From the start, we designed AO to be the “un-LMS” – just the features you need without the clutter. Our pricing model is much more attractive to small- and medium-sized businesses than most of the players in the traditional LMS world. I’ve written a bit more on this topic in this blog entry, which also includes a link to a more in-depth (19-minute) overview of Articulate Online.
Here’s a link to learn more about Articulate Online Features.
Hope this helps! And thanks again for the post.
Sincerely,
Gabe Anderson
Director of Customer Support
Articulate – Empowering Rapid E-Learning
http://www.articulate.com
Thanks, Gabe, for the answers. I’ll be interested to see how your product is adopted by the market — it looks like a good model for people who want something that’s easy to understand and quick to implement.
One of the top concerns I heard at the Masie LMS show in Las Vegas was integration and options for movement of data — when a company is purchased, or somehow merges their learning data with another entity.
Maybe we can do a podcast interview after you’ve got some customer stories to tell.