eActivity (Formerly called Activity Spice – mmm, good idea to change the name) is a quick and easy tool for creating interactive Flash elements to use in your existing courses. There’s no timelines or code to create, you simply create various interactive interactions to export and use in your preferred tool.

It’s easy to have a play. Go to www.eactivity.net and sign up for the 30 day trial. Everything is online and is Flash based, no installs required. The free 30 day trial comes with the standard library of interactions (over 30) and the Premium subscription gives you access to even more.

Nice price

Can’t argue with the pricing. $49 a month allows you to publish 10 activities a day and save up to 50 on their website. The 30 day trial is a good starting point. You can publish up to 2 activities a day so it’s well worth creating a few to try in your e-Learning tool and then a day or two later create some more advanced ones to use. 2 a day is a little limiting but it is a free trial.

You can even host your activities online with eActivity if you have the Premier package or simply download them to drop into your course.

Getting started

After logging on you’re presented with an easy to use menu with the various types of interactions on the left hand side consisting of ‘present information’, ‘learning games’ and ‘knowledge tests’.

There’s a very good Getting Started video to view (Created in Captivate – ironic given the revelation in the next section) which is well worth spending a few minutes seeing what eActivity can do. It’s easy to use. You select the type of interaction you want to create. Plenty to choose from including your standard Carousel animations and animated Circle processes. I’ll choose a ‘Pyramid with 5 layers’. If you use Articulate Engage you’ll be more than familiar with a few of these interactions.

The activity loads up and you can change most of the elements on the screen. You can change the colours, the text labels, the size, add a title page and also add a final page where once they’ve clicked all the layers the text is displayed.

When you make your changes you can see the difference instantly, once you’re happy with your interaction you can save it (the 30 day trial allows you to save 5, premier 50) and finally publish. And that’s when the fun started.

Plug and don’t play….

The .swf published quickly and was ready for download. We took the .swf and loaded it up into Dreamweaver – no problems. We like to be more thorough with these plug and play tools. We dropped it into Captivate. Problems. Captivate didn’t like the .swf file. Changing Captivate to Action Script 3 doesn’t yield any joy. Everything was going so well…

This is a limitation, as Captivate is one of the major tools out there and can benefit a lot from flash interactions to lift it, but it doesn’t play nicely with eActivity. Raptivity doesn’t work with Captivate either which is frustrating. We emailed the technical team from eActivity but they admitted at this moment in time it’s not possible.

Quite frustrating especially since the text on the website says “builds custom eLearning flash activities to be inserted in whatever eLearning platform you are using” - well apart from one of the biggest tools in the market.

Overall eActivity is an good and easy tool to use, similar to Raptivity but you could use the tool for a few months (Just $49 a month) to create the interactions you need for a certain course and then come back to it on your next project. To use it for a full year is $539, so it’s not a massive outlay. Just make sure its output will work with whichever tool you’re using when you’re trialling it.

Kineo Rating: Good

Easy to use and will enhance your existing e-learning.

eActivity: The Full Road Test

Ease of use: Excellent

Very simple to use, the animated help file is useful but if you’re like us you like jumping into the deep end and having a go straight away. Easy to use and very simple to create some impressive Flash animations.

Instructional design flexibility : Good

There are a lot of very useful interactions to use in your training, unlike Raptivity there isn’t really any detail in how these could be used in particular courses, so you need a designer’s skill to determine how they can support your course best

Ability to incorporate existing content: Good

You can import your own graphics, you cannot import any audio or video however.

Ability to handle variety of topics: Good

There is a good range of interactions to use. There are the standard interactions such as interactive Pyramids, there are interactive conversations to create, quiz questions and also Carousels. Again, you need to take a view on how relevant they are to your course.

Ability to publish SCORM/AICC compliant courses: N/A

No scoring here I’m afraid, eActivity is used to create interactions to import into existing courses created with standard eLearning development tools.

Technical support available: Very Good

Very helpful and quick to get back to you.

Knowledgeable support team: Good

They were honest when it came to the issues with Captivate, but the text on their site is a little misleading as eActivity does not work with all the leading eLearning tools.

Conclusion:

eActivity is similar to Raptivity, both are very easy to use, both have a lot of different interactions for you to create and export. Both sadly don’t work with Captivate. But for any designers out there it’s a great tool to easily create very good interactive animations to import into your course. eActivity is simple to use and the results are impressive.

Tried eActivity? Agree or disagree with this review? Let us know.

Got an authoring tool, and need get some help in making the most of it? Kineo’s Rapid E-learning Design Team can help. Contact Kineo.

Kineo has accepted no payment or reward of any form from any tools company for this independent review.