Articulate Studio 09 and Adobe Captivate 5 are two eLearning authoring tools in our stable. Both have their good points and in this post I just want to highlight some things that have worked for us in education. First of all our environment. We have a diverse and largely remote spread of more than 170 schools. All are connected by internet and many are connected by a reasonably fast internet connection given the remoteness of the location.

Classrooms use electronic whiteboards and children have access to a variety of devices from the small XO laptop to personal computers, laptops and yes, the iPad.

Channelling learning objects to students via teachers over the internet is done in a number of ways. Moodle is our Learning Management System of choice and Adobe Connect and REACT are two of the video conferencing or webinar solutions we have. We do have others - webex, OCS, Polycom and even Skype but for the purpose of discussing Articulate and Captivate, I will focus on Adobe Connect.

I am not going to provide a head to head comparison of the two products... here are a couple of threads for you to visit http://www.articulate.com/forums/general-discussion/6681-articulate-vs-adobe-captivate.html and this great mashup at http://www.elearninglearning.com/articulate/captivate/

I want to talk about two projects, one where I used Articulate and another where I used Captivate. Ironically, I started both projects intending to use the other product.

Captivate and Articulate both focus on using PowerPoint slide decks as the basis for laying out content. That works for me because PowerPoint is part of our Standard Operating Environment and we hope that teachers and developers are comfortable using this product to create nuggets of information. These could be two or three slides, certainly not a mind numbing death by PowerPoint that we have all endured at some stage.

The PowerPoint slides are then opened in either Captivate or Articulate and that is where you add video, audio narration, interactions, software simulations, quizzes before deciding how and where you are going to publish it.

The "where" for us is pretty straight forward. We can publish Captivate content to our Learning Management System (LMS) which I have mentioned is Moodle,  or directly into Adobe Connect which is faster than publishing to Moodle. Articulate published content generally goes straight in Moodle and it doesn't play nicely in Adobe Connect.

We also have a SharePoint environment where these packages could be published, but it makes sense to store them in a Learning Management System rather than a general web portal site.

We also tend to package our published content up as Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 1.2 packages, even if if there are no quizzes that require recorded results. Our reason for that is packaging for SCORM places the content into a ZIP file that makes it easy to deploy to a LMS like Moodle. It gathers all of the assets like video and audio files into one big file and ensures that you don't miss out on uploading a crucial file. SCORM is portable, so a course developed in Victoria and shared with the Northern Territory can uploaded into our LMS and it will work.

Where ever possible, we want to deliver across the web, but if required we can deliver as a download, a CD/DVD or on a memory stick. CDs, Books, Memory Sticks rely on snail mail and they can get lost or damaged.

So with creation and delivery processes explained, let's look at these two projects. The first, completed in Articulate was our Corporate Orientation which morphed halfway through the project into the DET Orientation as we realised that much of the base content could be delivered to corporate as well as teaching staff.

Why Articulate? On big files with interactions and videos, Captivate can be buggy and crash. I started out using Captivate and became frustrated with the constant crashing as my development file grew and grew. I switched to Articulate and the crashing stopped. Having used both products for the same PowerPoint, I was amazed at how much smaller the final Articulate package was compared to the Captivate package which I had abandoned before adding most of the audio -The difference was 12 megabytes vs 43 megabytes. The downside was that to render out the Articulate package as a SCORM ZIP file takes much longer than the same file in Captivate.

The navigation chrome for both the products is very similar and features the ability to have a minimalist interface or complete chrome with speaker bio, notes, thumbnails as well as the play, pause, stop rewind panel.

Authoring in PowerPoint with Articulate is easier and more intuitive than with Captivate. However, in the next project I want to discuss, the workflow of Captivate was better and more intuitive.

In the second project, I had to convert children's reading books from PDF format into PowerPoint before adding in narration and matching speech highlights. I used a product called "Able2Extract" which can convert PDF files into a variety of formats including PowerPoint. It did a very good job converting the fonts from the PDF into matching fonts in the PowerPoint. This would give me a crisper looking output in whichever authoring tool I selected.

The books output as 1050 pixels wide by 511 pixels high with two book pages to a "widescreen" looking PowerPoint slide. What I didn't know was that Articulate requires output to be in a 4:3 screen ratio and my widescreen format was never going to be able to be scrunched into that size. So I fired up Captivate and was pleasantly surprised by three things. The speed of saving and publishing was greater than Articulate. Saving to Adobe Connect was a one button press and lightning fast. You must be using Adobe Connect 8 with Adobe Captivate 5 otherwise bad things happen when you try to play the file in a share pod.

The books, being for young children learning how to read only have a few words on each page accompanied by a picture on the facing page. I recorded the entire book as a WAV file in SoundBooth which is part of the eLearning Suite 2 which Captivate is a part of. I then imported this audio file into Captivate and was able to elect to spread the audio file over the slides in the presentation. This meant that rather than having to record twenty separate WAV files and match them to the correct slide, I could play the audio file and click to mark where the next slide should appear. This meant that I was able to convert, add audio and publish a 30 page book to Adobe Connect in 30 minutes To publish it to Moodle might take another 5 minutes.

The books do not have video inserted into them which can cause problems when using Captivate (if the movies are too long) so the type of product I was creating or in this case repurposing lent itself to being worked using Captivate rather than Articulate.

Both are good tools and both also have limitations. We are fortunate to have both.

It is worth noting that the output from these products will no play on an iPad.

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