Learning Principles in E-learning tools
To make an effective training program for Acronis, we decided to do a competitive analysis of the existing training software and what are the features they provide which make them effective tools for authoring content or platforms designed to facilitate learning based on evidence-based principles. The reason we decided to do the report this way is that there are 1000s of products each of them claiming to have some innovative feature that makes them better than other competitors. But no one in the adult learning environment claims to actually tell how this feature makes their product effective.
An authoring system is a program that has pre-programmed elements for the development of interactive multimedia software titles. Authoring systems can be defined as software that allows its users to create multimedia applications for manipulating multimedia objects.
Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are software platforms designed to facilitate seamless software learning by simplifying the user experience and ensuring proficiency on any software platform, website, or app. These tools arose to ensure successful digital transformation and to increase ROI on software investments.
In this report, we are trying to pick up a list of authoring tools and DAPs to analyze what principles can be easily implemented because there is a feature available in the tool environment which facilitates production in no time.
Learning Science in Authoring Tools
Most of the companies like Amazon or NBC uses the existing authoring tools instead of building their own tools.
After searching a lot, we narrowed down our focus in 2 authoring tools only based on their wide spread use and advantages in this field:
- Adobe Captivate
- Articulate 360
Articulate 360
For Articulate 360, they offer two authoring tools, Articulate Storyline, and Rise which are almost similar. The only difference in them is summarized as the features in Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and Rise:
After the analysis, we decided to only refer to Articulate Storyline from this point onwards as they offer similar experiences and features besides the one we highlighted above.
Here’s a list of learning science principles and how they can be implemented in the authoring tools using these particular features:
Modality Principle
Use relevant graphics explained by audio narration to communicate content. Write in a conversational style using first and second person.
Professional Narration
In Articulate you can add the text to speech option where you can just enter the text, language, and choose voice agents with different types of voices for generating the audio. You can also generate closed captions for the slide audio and set the audio to be played just as slide audio or as a trigger.
Adobe Captivate provides the same functionality but only in the English language.
Job Validity Principle
Make the lessons on analysis of actions and thoughts of expert practitioners using the system through cognitive task analysis. It recommends using realistic job scenarios, tools, and cases to teach job-specific problem-solving processes.
Hotspots
A Freeform Hotspot question allows you to define one or more hotspots on a slide and provide feedback based on the user’s interaction. This way you can record step by step interactions of your learners with the interface of software by taking screenshots and defining feedback for various hotspots.
In Articulate and Captivate, you can not only define hotspots for simple interactions but also create a virtual reality project adding 360-degree slides to normal projects with hotspots and questions building simple and complex interactions. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts and add accessibility text.
Dials and Sliders
Interactive dials and sliders can be used to let learners manipulate data, explore cause-and-effect relationships, and control other objects in the course. Dials are similar to sliders, but where sliders move along a straight path, dials move in an arc or a circular path. Sliders and Dials are easily available in Articulate.
In Captivate, the sliders can only be programmed which is a shortcoming for non-programmers who rely on interactive tools to set variables and this much code can prevent a lot of people to use it.
Personalization Principle
Use virtual coaches (agents) to deliver instructional content such as examples and hints. You can also script virtual coaches to present instructional content such as examples and hints via audio.
Characters
There are a lot of illustrated and photographic characters in Articulate to add life to your courses and engage learners.
In Captivate you can download and upload characters but you can only import one character at a time which limits the productivity.
Multimedia Principle
Use relevant graphics and text to communicate content. Use animations to demonstrate procedures and a series of stills to illustrate processes. Use explanatory visuals that show relationships among content topics to build a deeper understanding. Write in a conversational style using first and second person.
Powerpoint Import
The best and fastest way to implement multimedia principle right now is through embedding a powerpoint in your course.
In Articulate, users have the ability to import slides from a PowerPoint presentation. Prior to importing, Storyline will display a two-dimensional grid showing all slides in the presentation to help the user select only those slides that are needed. Slide content is converted into Storyline objects (text boxes, shapes, etc.), becomes part of the slide, and can be moved around and edited in Storyline.
On the other hand, while PowerPoint slides can be imported into a Captivate project, it’s worth noting that slides are imported as single objects. This means that content cannot be edited directly in Captivate, any edits have to go through PowerPoint, which adds extra steps to the process and makes the development process less convenient. In addition, you cannot interact with PowerPoint objects through Advanced Actions in Captivate.
Reflections from Authoring Tools
The authoring tools are a great way to author content but they still have no way of recommending how to improve the content present in them based on what works or not works. It is entirely possible to author something with these tools which can even harm learning.
Based on the analysis of authoring tools, for now, Articulate Storyline is a clear choice not only being more productive due to limitations of other competitors but also because you can implement most of the learning science principles using it in no time due to a huge library of animations available. For Captivate you have to basically program every little feature that you want in your learning experience which is a very time-consuming process in which a lot of iterative data-driven improvements can be made to create a more effective course in Articulate.
But if you do want to customize something in Articulate it is a lot harder than Captivate and may need many more resources to accomplish that.
The main drawback is that there is no way to design any kind of evaluation in these tools like A/B testing right now. If there can be a way to target one flow of users to group A and the other to group B. There can be an analytics page for each flow to see what percentage of users reached the goal after having seen the flow. This should allow you to see which flow has been more effective at driving users to the goal which will enable you to make smart decisions.
Our future hope is that they incorporate some kind of mechanisms that can tell the instructional designers what they can do to improve the learning outcomes of what they designed in some way.
Learning Science in Digital Adoption Tools
We also conduct detailed analysis for several digital adoption tools to further guide our design direction and also help us understand what possible principles we can apply to our own product. We primarily focus on three products here:
- Toonimo
- Appcues
- Pendo
Toonimo
Toonimo is a cloud-based digital walkthrough platform that helps guide users through website funnels. Toonimo works by overlaying human voice audio and graphical coach marks on web pages to guide or orient web users. Other features include an analytics dashboard, A/B testing functionality, a personalization suite, and more. The company serves financial, insurance, healthcare, telecommunication, education, travel, hospitality, and other industries in both B2B and B2B2C situations.
Personalized & Modality Principle
Use a conversational style of writing or speaking (including using first‐person and second‐person language), polite wording for feedback and advice, and a friendly human voice.
Real Voice Instruction
Toonimo drives user engagement with a friendly real voice and a conversational style for the narration and instruction.
Narration & Caption
Toonimo presents the instruction of each step using audio narration rather than on-screen text. But Toonimo also provides caption feature for users. Users could see the caption if they want to understand the narration better.
Multimedia Principle
Live Graphics
Toonimo supports users to add on-page annotations and rich graphics for their project. All these live graphics are tailored to any browser on any device.
Worked-example Principle
Toonimo provides step-by-step guidance for learners. This step-by-step guidance is great when training or onboarding and it will keep the user interacting with the page.
Contiguity Principle
Align words to corresponding graphics. This means that a graphic that is the major subject of text should not be physically separated from the text.
Tooltips
Toonimo supports both audio and text tooltips. The tooltips can be popped up on specific fields that need additional context. Tooltips can be triggered by either mouse hover or mouse click on an existing field or on a new tooltip trigger icon Toonimo can add to the webpage. The tooltips will provide explanations near to the point which learners need.
Appcues
Appcues is a customer experience software service. It can help companies create and implement a smooth, personalized user onboarding process or new feature releasing walkthroughs. People who use this digital adoption tool do not have to write any code, then they can just simply create product tours, walkthroughs and in-app messages to welcome their customers by interacting with the main working canvas. The fun part about this product is that you need to install a chrome extension to make it work smoothly.
There are several use cases for Appcues product:
- Personalized onboarding experiences: it allows people to make a great onboard experience for users by creating a great first impression. Users can also be guided to discovery and be familiarized with the product quickly.
- Feature adoption: by using Appcues, the engagement and adoption rates of products will be highly improved. The relevant walkthroughs will be provided for users.
- Customer surveys and feedback: some qualitative product feedback can be collected to inform product decisions.
So, what principles are behind these features?
Understanding Learners’ Needs
Gather customer feedback and actionable customer insights at scale:
Using Appcues allows us to create a survey or feedback form to gather feedback from users for certain features or processes. Also, they can, therefore, target the right audience and create/save user segments based on behavior and attributes.
Guided Discovery
For the onboarding and new feature release part, the Appcues actually provides product’s users with the chances to discover and explore by themselves before directly using the app. So it is so nice that Appcues allows there users to build certain guidances for the target customers. After such guided discovery, the customers will have a deeper understanding of how to use the product and improve their efficiency.
A/B Testing
Since Appcues allows people to easily change and update the onboarding process and feature adoption etc, the company who used this product can easily conduct A/B testing for certain onboarding processes and understand what they need to explain more and might also add additional steps on the boarding process.
A/B testing can be assigned under 1 hour
Pendo
Personalization Principle
People learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
Personalized, just-in-time user onboarding and tutorials
Pendo in-app guides allow product teams to highlight new features, drive preferred behavior, and provide in-context support. Contextual, personalized guidance provides help when and where it’s needed, simplifies any user experience, and improves overall usability.
Contiguity Principle
Align words to corresponding graphics. This means that a graphic that is the major subject of text should not be physically separated from the text.
Guidance
In Pendo, the guidance is placed next to the corresponding feature.
Dashboard
After exploring these tools we realized that none of them offered the main functionality of visualizing the data of how learner interacted with the system so we decided to explore data dashboard for how to make decisions on where the gaps are in the content and how can they influence changes in the course.
Open Learning Initiative
For the dashboard, we think that Open Learning Initiative dashboard has most of the data that has been proven to be effective to find the gaps in the course and based on evidence. Other products are really behind but it’s catered to an academic audience in a structured course for university students so we will try to learn from it and see how we can extract the parts which are useful for adult training for software.
References
We would like to thank our mentor Timmy Burkhart for providing us with a lot of helpful insights for this report.
Storyline vs. Captivate: Features of Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate Compared Side-by-Side
E-learning Heroes — №1 Community for Course Creators
Storyline vs. Captivate: Features of Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate
