Raptivity E-Learning

Paul Johns has been wrapping his head around Raptivity this month. Here he shares his views.

The first thing you notice about Raptivity is that it can’t be used to create a single linear course. You have a fantastic range of standalone interactions to work with (200+ with the full version) and you can arrange these into courses on your LMS. Within Raptivity, there is no way to have them linked up, so that they launch as a single course.

To some extent, so what? It encourages you to break up courses up into short targeted chunks- that’s no bad thing. It’s where you are mixing presentation screens and questions that you might loose out by not having the continuity. But, as you’ll see later, interactions can be imported into other tools.

And what about the 200 interactions? Are they actually any good? Actually, yes. You can customise interactions quite easily so they don’t appear to be ‘straight out the box’. Background graphics can be changed, colours, text and audio can all be easily changed. You have a lot more control over how interactions appear than you would do in Articulate. As always, you need to be clear on the purpose of the interaction in your design, and how it supports the learning experience you’re trying to create – but there’s plenty to work with here.

Let’s take a look at the steps involved in working with an interaction. You can start by browsing by category. I went for Business Visuals and chose the 3D Pyramid interaction.

Once you have chosen the interaction you are taken into a simple wizard. You can choose options here like the title and, in this case, the number of faces the pyramid has. After this you are taken into the interaction editor.

The editor isn’t bad, but it isn’t super-intuitive either. You can preview what you are doing as you work, but finding the field you need to change is a tiny bit fiddly.

Having said that, in the space of just a few minutes I was able to create an interactive pyramid where the user has three different faces to explore.I published it with SCORM tracking.

I then went on to publish my interaction as a swf. Being Kineo’s lead Captivate developer, I wanted to import my interaction into my favourite tool. It didn’t really work. I managed to get one interaction to show, but multiple interactions were a non-starter.

However, Raptivity does have a PDF explaining how to import your animation into various tools including Articulate, Lectora, Dreamweaver, PowerPoint and many others.

Kineo Rating: Recommended

A good value tool that can enhance your existing training.

Raptivity: The Full Road Test

Ease of use: Good

It would take a tiny bit of getting used to. It’s not always totally obvious what you need to click to edit what and there are a lot of things that you can edit. It’s the usual trade-off between flexibility and usability.

Instructional design flexibility : Very Good

There is quantity here but also quality and plenty for the learning designer to work with. Raptivity have gone into detail in a lot of the interactions explaining how best they would be used which is shows some thought’s gone into it.

Ability to incorporate existing content: OK

You can import media, such as audio, video and animations. You can’t import from PowerPoint or word.

Ability to handle variety of topics: Very Good

The full version of Raptivity has 35 interactions, with the extra packs you could have over 200! Raptivity Presenter has 13, seems like it’s facing off against Articulate.

Ability to publish SCORM/AICC compliant courses: Very Good

With the full version you can create interactions with SCORM/AICC Tracking, with the ‘cut down’ Raptivity Presenter you can only create standalone swf’s to incorporate into existing training but this should not be a problem for many people.

Technical support available: Very Good

It’s well worth looking at the many demonstrations of the interactions on their website to see if the tool has enough range for your courses.

Knowledgeable support team: Good

Previously contacting support was very good, they came back to me quickly with answers. There is a help guide describing how to import Raptivity interactions into various tools but I was disappointed by the issues of importing Raptivity into Captivate.

Conclusion:

Raptivity is a great tool for non-programmers and designers to create engaging interactions to use in their existing courseware. The standard version of Raptivity (35 interactions) is priced at $750, the ‘cut-down’ Raptivity Presenter is very good value at $295 as you’ll get a lot of use out of the 13 interactions available. There are more packs to add to the full version which can give you a huge range of interactions to use.

If Raptivity worked well with Captivate I would be very happy as it would make Captivate a much more powerful e-Learning tool. Overall Raptivity is very good indeed and has a great wide range of interactions.

Tried Raptivity? 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.