ProForm: tool review
Kineo's resident tool expert Theo Cardiff has a look at ProForm. And then she lets you know what she thinks of it. And we mean, lets you know what she thinks of it.
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Do you like filling out forms?
I hate filling out forms. That was one reason I didn’t like Proform.
There are no pretty-pressy buttons, no click-and-drag, 2 pixels to left – does that look better? Just a bunch of ugly forms.
Then there are the games. They belong at the end of French lessons – a peace offering to make you smile after an hour of boredom. Except they don’t make you smile. They aren’t very good. ProForm has five of them.
The selection of presentation templates is abysmal. You are expected to go back and forth between Swish the swf creator, RapidCam the screen capture tool, publishing out assets to drop into ProForm – the whole process to be repeated should you ever need to amend something.
So why bother looking at ProForm at all?
ProForm allows developers a lot of access to source code. You can create your own presentational screens. You can customise all aspects of the look and feel of templates and navigation. In this respect it is a bit like Atlantic Link or Giunti’s authoring tool. They aren’t much out of the box, but can be developed into something good.
And even the forms have got their advantages. If the people working with the tool know more about content than whether something should be 2 pixels to the left, the restrictions imposed by the forms can be beneficial.
However, there are two big problems with form based tools. The form needs to be filled out correctly. An image cropped to the wrong size or a bit too much text and the whole screen becomes a mess.
Forms aren’t that easy to fill in. You will probably end up with 2-3 specialists working with the tool. In that case why not have people who can layout a screen around that awkward image that can’t be cropped into place? Use the kind of people who don’t need a form to tell them what to do.
How did I rate it?
I couldn’t really see a big advantage in ProForm as a desktop tool. You would need flash developers to get you going and therefore the overall cost would be high. But for the record:
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Criteria
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Rating
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Comments
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Ease of use
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OK
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A bit unintuitive at times.
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Instructional design flexibility
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Poor
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Out of the box it can’t do much.
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Ability to incorporate existing content
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Poor
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You can import a PowerPoint – it puts all the slides into one speed auto-playing swf.
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Ability to handle variety of topics
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Poor
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It has dull presentation screens, whacky games, no branching, no inbuilt screen capturing
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Ability to incorporate graphics and media
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OK
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Handles swf, flv, jpeg and audio, no png though.
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Ability to publish SCORM/AICC compliant courses
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Very good
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It publishes, it tracks.
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Technical support available
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Very good
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If its online support is anything to go by, I would say it is good.
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Tried ProForm? 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 in any form, from any tools companies for this independent review.
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