Wondershare: tool reviewWondershare offers to “Enhance your learning content development with an intuitive work environment”. That sounds like it means something. What exactly? Stop wondering: we share our take on the tool in our review. First Impressions Familiar surroundings to start with. The Wondershare Rapid Elearning suite is very similar to Articulate in the sense that it is also a PowerPoint add-on and it includes a Quiz Creator with a very similar format to Articulate Quizmaker. Once you launch the “Wondershare Rapid Elearning suite” it is simple to work your way around the tool and begin building content. And if you know Articulate already, well it’s all the easier. You can quickly and easily create interactive custom e-learning content which looks clean and professional and as if it has been built in Flash, and can be tracked using SCORM/AICC. No knowledge of Flash or Actionscript is required, only PowerPoint; this tool does the rest for you. ‘Branching’ and ‘leafing’ (cute) can be implemented in the Slide Structure to enable you to create non-linear courses. The Quizcreator allows you to create 9 different formats of quiz, including all of your very best friends such as multiple choice, multiple response, true/false and fill in the blank. You simply input the content into the fields, and choose the different types of multimedia you wish to import into them. There are lots of properties and settings which you can use to customise quizzes such as the points value, difficulty levels, number of attempts the user can have and whether you would like to have the feedback set by the question or the answer. So all round, pretty flexible. Quizcreator includes Player Templates: collecting data from the user when they take the quiz and also the ability to set time limits for the quiz. Quizcreator exports the quizzes as swfs which can be dropped into your PowerPoint to be published with the rest of your course. You create the course using the presenter part of the suite, called ‘PPT2Flash’. Not a hip-hop star. Just in case you’re concerned. Another nice feature of the suite is the “Wondershare DemoCreator”. This is simple screen recording software with the functionality to allow you to add voiceovers and put them into your course. The audio editing facility is fairly basic but can be used to cut and paste audio, although it doesn’t support the changing of volumes. But hey, it’s $99. One downside that we found with this tool was the lack of ‘slide-view’ for creating and editing the layout of quiz questions. Quiz Creator places all of your content for you in set places which you cannot modify. It would be nice to have the freedom of moving content around for yourself as this allows for more creativity and saves some time. Another downside is that there appears to lack the functionality to apply a custom skin, unlike tools such as Captivate and Articulate. So for people like us who really want to give a very custom look and feel for our clients, it’s somewhat limited. Kineo’s rating: Recommended Wondershare is priced to move - you can pick up the whole suite for around $600. It’s not as feature rich as say Articulate, which it seems to aim to compete with, but for a lower priced option, and if you’re not too worried about complete control over look and feel, it could well be worth a look. You can check it out for yourself and download a free trial here: http://www.sameshow.com/
Use Wondershare Rapid Elearning suite? Agree or disagree with this review? Let us know. |
