Today we released Articulate Studio ’09 Update 1. This release features a single Studio ’09 installer, which will uninstall all previous versions of Articulate software, as well as a number of enhancements and bug fixes in all 4 products included in the Studio ’09 Pro suite.
Here’s how to upgrade (if you’re not automatically prompted in your Studio ’09 products):
Existing Studio ’09 Customers: Go to Help -> About -> Check for Updates (or visit this page).
Trial Studio ’09 Customers: Visit this page to learn how to update.
Here’s a sneak peek of the new consolidated Studio ’09 Update 1 installer, which allows you to select any or all Studio ’09 products to install (no more worrying about separate product installers):
Step 2: Create an e-learning course using any combination of Articulate Studio ’09 products. Judges are looking at the following criteria:
Effective use of Studio ’09 products and features
Effectiveness of course content to transfer knowledge
Use of compelling media (graphics, audio, video, etc.)
Broad use of authoring tool features
Bonus for integrating Presenter ‘09, Quizmaker ’09, and Engage ’09 into one course, but we’ll also accept courses authored using a single Articulate tool or combination of our products
If you don’t have a course you can share, create one. It can be about anything. The subject matter isn’t that important. We’re just looking for great courses.
Got great Articulate authoring skills, but don’t have any non-confidential courses that you are able to share? Create a new course on a topic you’re an expert on! Choose a subject that’s fun to you such as gardening, running, technology, rock climbing… whatever!
Here are some some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
Lessons learned from your favorite TV show (Video Encoder ‘09 should come in handy here)
You’ll have the opportunity to win:
Grand Prize: $1,500
2nd Prize: $500
3rd Prize: $250
All prize winners will also receive:
Two licenses of Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio ’09 Pro donated to the school or charity of their choice.
Fame, prestige and recognition by being featured on our website.
Winners will be announced at a special Articulate event on March 9, 2009. Stay tuned for more information on that in this blog! Enter as many items as you like before the submission deadline of February 18, 2009.
It’s been an exciting year for Articulate: We released our Studio ‘09 products (along with a redesigned website); we won the Best of Elearning! for the 3rd year in a row; we were named an ABA finalist as Most Innovative Company for the 2nd year in a row; we were named among the ASP 10 Best Support Sites of 2008 for the 2nd year in a row; we hosted our first-ever user group conference, which sold out in no time; and much more…
All these accolades translate into lots and lots of customers, which means we need help supporting everyone. In fact, we like to hire our customers, so if either of these jobs interests you, we’d love to hear from you:
On Saturday, October 25, 2008 we upgraded Articulate Online for hosted customers to version 1.10. Full release notes are available in the Knowledge Base.
Two updates are worth pointing out:
Articulate Online now supports Flash Player 10 for Presenter 5 content: All Presenter 5 content hosted in Articulate Online accounts has been updated to support Flash Player 10. You can learn more about this issue in my previous blog post. Presenter ‘09 content continues to work as expected with Flash Player 10.
Articulate Online now allows a much-requested feature to include full user profile information in exported CSV/XML reports: Want more than just basic user details in your exported reports? Enable this new feature and your reports that contain user info will provide you with comprehensive user data. Learn more in this Knowledge Base entry.
Existing and new Articulate Online hosted customers needn’t do anything to take advantage of these and other enhancements. You will see these changes reflected in your account the next time you login.
Update (10.30.2008): The updater now supports Presenter 4.
Today Adobe released Flash Player 10 out of beta. If you or your users upgrade to this latest version of the Flash Player, you may not be able to properly view presentations created with Articulate Presenter 4 or 5.
What’s the issue?
A Flash file used to play your presentations (stealthray.swf) cannot accurately detect the version number of the newly released Flash 10 Player.
How do I know if I’m affected by this issue?
If your presentations look like this:
…then right-click on the presentation and see if it says “About Adobe Flash Player 10…” It will look like this:
If it does, then you’re using Flash Player 10 and are impacted by the Flash Player update.
What should I do to fix this?
You’ll need to do the following to fix your Presenter 4 or 5 presentations (your users need not do anything except restart their browsers and/or clear their browser cache after you’ve run the updater):
Run the updater (look for the Flash 10 Updater icon on your desktop) on all your local and Web-based Presenter 4 & 5 presentations. The updater is really easy to use and will walk you through the process:
Clear your browser cache (and instruct your users to do the same) and view impacted Presenter 4 & 5 presentations; they should play just fine now.
Important notes:
Studio ‘09 (including Presenter ‘09) and other Articulate products (such as Quizmaker 2.x and Quizmaker ‘09) are not impacted by this Flash 10 issue (Engage 1.x authoring tool is the only other impacted application; the updater will also address the issue with it)
The updater will also update your installed Presenter 5 files, so new presentations will not need to be updated
Now that the best elearning software just got even better with our recent release of Studio ‘09, it’s time to take your voice to the ballot and cast your vote for Elearning! Magazine’s annual “Best of…” contest.
If you take a look at our virtual trophy case, you’ll see that thanks to readers like you, our tools have been named the best around 3 years in a row.
Ready to help us secure a 4th consecutive win?
Please take a moment now to cast your ballot for the Best of 2008. The deadline is Saturday, November 1, 2008, and here are the categories where we’d appreciate your support:
Best Presentation Tool: Articulate Presenter
Best Web Authoring Tool: Articulate Presenter
Best Assessment Tool: Articulate Quizmaker
You don’t even have to vote in every category, so that makes voting even faster. Thanks for your support!
Your vote makes a big difference to your colleagues in our field:
Approximately 49% of e-learning professionals seek advice from peers when sourcing solution, according to Elearning! Magazine’s User Survey.
The Best of Elearning! Awards was created to share what over 150,000 e-learning professionals recommend. In its 4th year, the Best of Elearning! Awards is the exclusive reader’s choice awards in the e-learning market.
“Loved this conference. Please have more of them!”
- Attendee, First-Ever Articulate User Group Conference in Philadelphia
Monday, September 22, 2008 marked the first-ever Articulate User Group Conference. A sold-out crowd of 200 gathered in Philadelphia at Drexel University alongside a team of 5 of us from Articulate.
The action-packed day included a sneak peek of Studio ‘09, led by Mark and Don; Articulate and PowerPoint tips from Tom, the man behind The Rapid E-Learning Blog; a series of customer presentations on their experiences using Articulate software; a lunchtime, anything-goes Q&A with the Articulate team; a tech support station with Justin; and lots more.
“I really applaud Articulate for being willing to put Tom, Gabe, and Justin up front and in the firing line to take any and all questions/comments from the audience. You never know what can come up during those things. BRAVO for you. That time alone raised my appreciation and respect for the company tenfold! Overall I think the conference was fantastic and am looking forward to attending more in the future. Great job!”
It was our first attempt at this, and we learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work (there was plenty that went well and there’s a lot of room for improvement). There will be more regional user conferences (stay tuned for details!) and they’ll be even better next time around.
Nearly half the conference attendees took the time to fill out our post-conference survey and provided us with valuable feedback. Rest assured that we’ve reviewed it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly. And we’re committed to making future conference experiences in line with our product experience — the best around.
Although we did get our fair share of constructive criticism (and passionate complaints), we also got lots of enthusiastic input on the conference, so I’ll share more of those highlights below, including this great post that appeared on our forums the night of the conference:
“WOW!!! That is all I can say!! I just got back to my hotel room from the User’s Group Meeting and it was incredible. As a new Articulate user, it was extremely helpful to learn tips from Tom and Gabe as well as all of the other amazing users who presented. What a great idea! I am ready to attend the next one!! Great idea!!”
- Cody Carlton
Director of Training and Development
Branagh Information Group, Inc.
And some additional feedback:
“Overall, I found the user conference to be one of the best ones I have attended. The topics covered were very interesting and applicable to our needs. I thought the Articulate group did an awesome job of being organized and staying, as best they could, on task. Thank you for a wonderful and insightful conference! Well worth the time and travel to hear what you had to cover. :-)”
One challenge we faced with this inaugural conference was how to accommodate various levels of Articulate product experience in the audience. What are your suggestions for how we do that next time?
“This was a great idea! As a very new user, I learned a tremendous amount. Tom’s tips were tremendous and the showcase section was incredibly helpful as well. Job well done!!”
A big thank you to everyone who attended, and to Drexel for hosting the conference!
We hope to see you at the next user group — date & location TBD, but subscribe to my blog and you’ll always get the latest news!
I’m pleased to announce that the much-anticipated major upgrades to Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker, and Engage are now available. All three products, along with the all-new Articulate Video Encoder, are available as part of Articulate Studio ‘09 Pro.
Along with these exciting new releases is an upgraded website and support site, chock-full of comprehensive feature tours (AP09 | QM09 | EN09), product demos (AP09 | QM09 | EN09), and excellent new tutorials:
As you’ll see in the demos, there are so many new and exciting features in all of the products that it’s impossible to outline everything here, but I’ll highlight a few of the features that “simply leave other eLearning development apps I’ve seen in the dust,” as Chris at eQuixotic put it (Articulate Studio ‘09 Has Arrived!).
Here are some of my favorite new features in each product:
And, of course, if you’re not quite ready to upgrade, you can still download a free 30-day trial of all the new products today.
As Tony Karrer predicted and I echoed back in Jaunary, it’s time for “Articulate to dominate in 2008.”
Enjoy these amazing new releases!
A big thank you to our beta testers, without whom these releases would not be as solid as they are, and congrats to the entire Articulate team on a successful product launch!
As the leaves begin to fall and the thermometers take a dip here in the U.S., that means that the fall elearning conference season is upon us. We have a packed calendar that may get even more packed as we add events to it.
We already have 5 industry conferences on the calendar, including the just-added Educause 2008 — the “premier IT event in higher education” — and may add even more, thanks to the overwhelming response to our sold-out inaugural Articulate Regional User Group Conference in Philadelphia a week from today.
Keep those inquiries coming if you’d like to attend or host a conference in your city (click here to contact us and select “User Group” from the Interested In drop-down menu).
We haven’t announced other locations yet, but make sure you’re subscribed to my blog to receive all the latest Articulate announcements. You can also click here to subscribe to the Articulate Calendar via Google Calendar.
Here’s a quick summary of our upcoming conference appearances:
I’ll be at the Articulate Regional User Group Conference in Philly and Training 2009 in Atlanta, and Tom Kuhlmann, author of the award-winning and wildly popular Rapid eLearning Blog, will be at all conferences, along with other Articulate staff.
We hope to see you at one of these conferences! We’re going to have a lot to show off, including our upcoming new releases.
We’re often asked if we have help documentation in languages other than English. Although the authoring interface of our products is available only in English, content can be translated into any language. However, we currently do not offer non-English documentation.
But thanks to one enthusiastic customer with a desire to share with the Articulate community, I’m pleased to say that now there’s at least one way for Spanish speakers around the world to learn how to author quizzes and surveys in Quizmaker.
Not only is this a great, interactive Quizmaker tutorial in Español, it also shows off a great use of Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio features, including the following:
Engage slide interactions in Presenter
Quizmaker quiz in Presenter
PowerPoint animations published with Presenter
Use of hyperlinks for navigation in Presenter
Quizmaker Tutorial en Español
Below you can view the full Spanish tutorial of Quizmaker 2 in its entirety:
I asked the author of the tutorial, Ghada de Souki of Venezuela, why she chose Articulate, and about her experience creating the tutorial with Articulate products.
Why did you need elearning software?
I took a course for my Master’s degree at Colegios Mater Salvatoris, where I had to select from a very big list of applications and to design a class to explain it.
I was working on my thesis in Venezuela, where technology almost doesn’t exist — especially in education — so I proposed that using technology in evaluation might bring a lot of benefits for both students and teachers through a paper I wrote. As a solution to this problem I proposed to teach teachers in secondary level how to use these applications.
Why did you choose Articulate products?
I investigated different applications for graded questions and selected two, including Quizmaker. I immediately felt in love with all Articulate products, so I bought them all.
No other quizzing tool can offer the simplicity and the excellence that Quizmaker does.
Any challenges?
I did have one problem to get over: The language issue. So I solved it by a good design and incorporated the translation of text labels in the course. Another component I incorporated was the Engage Glossary as a quick search for the way graded questions can be designed, so users can use it to find the content they need.
What was the experience like?
Besides the the challenge of the language issue, I had a great experience. This tutorial is only my first project, but I hope I can take it to practice soon. I’m currently the only member of my organization using this application, but it’s worth the investment.
Today we released Articulate Studio ’09 Update 1. This release features a single Studio ’09 installer, which will uninstall all previous versions of Articulate software, as well as a number of enhancements and bug fixes in all 4 products included in the Studio ’09 Pro suite.
“WOW!!! That is all I can say!! I just got back to my hotel room from the User’s Group Meeting and it was incredible. As a new Articulate user, it was extremely helpful to learn tips from Tom and Gabe as well as all of the other amazing users who presented. What a great idea! I am ready to attend the next one!! Great idea!!”
