Presenter and PowerPoint

[patlaw]

I'm investigating using Presenter for a new online course. It appears that Presenter is used primarily for converting PowerPoint presentations. What does Presenter provide that PPT does not?

Unrelated, since I am not a PPT expert, it seems like I should bypass using PPT for our course and go straight to Engage. Does that approach make sense?

We may be interested in hiring a developer, but the project is low budget for now. The slides will include audio, stills, and video.

[GerryWaz]

Originally Posted by patlaw

I'm investigating using Presenter for a new online course. It appears that Presenter is used primarily for converting PowerPoint presentations. What does Presenter provide that PPT does not?

PLENTY!!!! It puts "PowerPoint on steroids" for a richer, deeper and more effective tool for producing e-learning.

This list, direct from the Articulate site, says it best:

http://www.articulate.com/products/p...r-features.php

I'd only add that it produces network-friendly content by dividing a course or presentation into many small files, which get "pseudo-streamed" over a network.

[GerryWaz]

Originally Posted by patlaw

Unrelated, since I am not a PPT expert, it seems like I should bypass using PPT for our course and go straight to Engage. Does that approach make sense?

That depends on your requirements exactly and what you will be doing.

If you wish to use the course with an LMS via AICC or SCORM, you need Presenter as it supplies that. Engage only outputs HTML.

Presenter also has quite a few features that Engage does not, like support for web objects, can use an imported SWF on any slide (not every Engage interaction supports SWFs), richer recording and audio features, etc.

And it can use a Engage interaction as a "Tab"--which a Engage standalone cannot do.

And there are some things you can do in native PowerPoint which Presenter supports.

I consider Presenter the "base" product around which the others flow and integrate with. True, you can do standalone QuizMaker quizzes and Engage interactions. However, the real power is the integration of the three together and how creative you can get.

Just a few highlights but for serious e-learning development, if you can, I'd get and use all three.

[patlaw]

Thanks for the information. Our application is a DVD-based classroom course for defensive driving. The course is free-running with no user interactivity or feedback. It is full motion video, including the title "slides" that pose questions and provide answers. The present system is too hard to modify and maintain. It requires the skills of a video editor. Unfortunately our original video editor disappeared, and his project organization was so poor that we have decided to produce the next course from scratch, using much of the same video footage.

We also have an online defensive driving course. It is a custom application written in classic ASP (yuck) with an MSSQL backend database. There are training "slides" and there are Q&A slides. After we produce the next DVD course, there will be an online version thereafter. The online version has user interaction and grading. Getting the present course online has taken a few years off of my life! Our developer disappears for days at a time without telling us, so we're looking for a solution (Articulate?) that does not have the skill set or learning curve requirements of ASP/SQL/Flash that we currently require.

If anyone wants to see our online course, please send me a PM and I'll send you a link to a demo. I'd rather not post that information publicly.

[GerryWaz]

Interesting application . . .

We're kind of in the same boat with some of our custom developed e-learning courses. You always need the developer to maintain them.

We will probably be encouraging our custom content developers to start using tools like the Articulate Suite so down the road, changes and maintenance are, for the most part, easier for the owners, SME's, or another developer to quickly make.

Best!

[Spectre]

One of Articulate's huge assets is the interactivty and control over the interactivity provided to users...a truly web-like experience vs. video's "sit back and watch" format. However, converting PPTs to purely free-playing videos is not AP's forte, as AP is not designed for this. Other apps like Camtasia would do a much better job...in fact, there are some cheap ones out there. I love Articulate's products, but for pure video, I would turn to something else.

With that said, I use video sparingly in web content...as it is more time-consuming to develop and maintain, and you have to take bandwidth into consideration. Often times, there are creative alternatives for video that are more effective and can be easily maintained.

The best thing to do--if you haven't begun to already--is really work over the fully-functional trial version of AP and try to create some brief proof of concept projects that represent what you would like to develop down the road. As you go along, feel free to fire out the questions as you're doing now.

One other thing to note: putting Articulate content on a CD/DVD cannot be done out of the box. You will need a third party utility to accomplish this.

HTH,
Phil