On behalf of Zoetis I visited the elearning Expo in Paris in March 2019.
Our Mission
The mission of these two days was:
To find an authoring tool which is intuitive to create custom e-learning for internal training purposes.
Together with Veronique Toulas – Zoetis Commercial L&D Director International, Europe and Emerging Markets – we were introduced to many companies providing digital learning solutions. There was quite an offer of Learning Management System providers, e-learning designers, mobile learning solutions and HR solutions.
To find an authoring tool which is intuitive to create custom e-learning for internal training purposes
Although authoring tools are nowadays often part of default learning management system features this was not what we were looking for. Zoetis is already using the SAP SuccessFactors LMS for their online training.
There were quite a few e-learning developers like Doing Better present, but in our quest to find an easy to learn authoring tool we found that this branch of e-learning was a little bit underrepresented. Popular authoring tools like Lectora and Adobe Captivate for example were present on this exposition. A tool which was demoed on the expo was Articulate 360.
Within Zoetis we are familiar with Articulate to create rapid, straight forward content using Articulate Studio’13. As the name might suggest, this tool has been around for some time now but was still useful as it is easy to use and has smooth integration with Microsoft PowerPoint. Doing Better, as an e-learning developer, was also already well known with this tool but it was enlightening to discuss with the experts about the various software which were included in the Articulate 360 package.
Comparing the tool with Adobe Captivate there are many similarities in features. Although we at Doing Better are a big fan of Captivate we must admit that the user interface of Articulate is much more intuitive and has a similar smooth integration with PowerPoint which would benefit starting developers in easily adopting this tool. Adobe Captivate does have the advantage that it is more flexible in responsive design. The Adobe tool uses Fluid Boxes to create responsive courses and can change appearance per device. Downside it takes some time to get the hang of working with this feature. Articulate simply scales the output to fit screen and is therefore much simpler but less flexible.
Conclusion
After comparing and discussing the differences we came to the conclusion that Articulate had won the preference to be used within Zoetis based on the user-friendliness of the tool and the type of content we are going to develop within the organization.The Paris eLearning Expo was also a lot of fun and inspiring. We got introduced to Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Video broadcasting solutions. It is definitely worth wile to visit e-learning expos more often to get inspired and keep track of the latest developments in learning and e-learning!
Looking forward to the next one.