Is Lectora the tool of choice?
July 23, 2008 12:00 AM
I'm not generally hung up on "look" -- since I'm not building e-courses for commercial sale, the thing I mostly care about is the quality of the instructional design and the user experience. It's true that there are some limitations to Lectora's test component from an instructional design point of view. However, I overcome many of them by replacing some of the native functionality with my own sets of actions. In fact, there's quite a lot of things you can do with actions and variables (and clever instructional design approaches) to make creative, effective things happen.Flash interactions are great if you have developers who know how to create them and graphic designers who can create custom graphics, as necessary. For many training departments, these resources don't exist and, in my experience, learning how to make one of those rich Flash interactions is a lot harder than learning Lectora, even to a high intermediate level.So, are there times that I'd like to do something quiz-wise that really can't be done exactly as I envisioned it using Lectora's native functionality (i.e., without javascript, etc.)? Yes. But most of the time I've been able to find acceptable alternatives. Also, Lectora has improved significantly with each major update. I was not really a fan of Lectora when I first started using it in 2004 or so (in fact, I thought it was incredibly anemic compared to what I had been using, Toolbook), but it has improved so much since then that now I am. Are there still things I wish they'd fix in terms of quiz functionality? Sure -- for example, I'd like to have better drag-and-drop questions (where you can drop multiple items into one general drop area -- see the thread in the Suggestions forum for details). But it seems to me that, for now, Lectora has the best balance of ease-of-use and flexibilty/power of any full-fledged e-learning authoring tool that I know of.Just my $.02!Laura
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