Moodle vs. Studio 360 (discontinued)

Moodle is a Learning Management System and is best suited for just that. We didn't like the assessment piece of our full scale Learning Management System (nor did we want to purchase the entire assessment module) so we chose to use Moodle for this, and it works well. Installing this application with the intention of only using a portion of its capabilities can be successful in environments where you have technical skills and a broad understanding of integration between your systems. For institutions that lack these, you're better suited to using a full scale of an LMS with assessment inside that same application.

Incentivized

Small to medium companies on a tight budget cannot go wrong. Articulate Studio enables smaller companies to produce compliant professional looking training courses without breaking the bank. Additionally, the product is quite intuitive to learn and use. I myself had never used a product such as this but was able to produce course work with quizzes that impressed senior management.

Incentivized

• Moodle's grade book works well. Assignments are integrated so the grades are recorded automatically.
• Moodle is customizable by administrators, so our version only gives us the options we need. NO Clutter.
• The discussion board offers several options for instructors that help with grading. I use "sum of points", but there are other options as well.

Incentivized

• Easy learning curve. Just some button clicks for recording narration, syncing animations, and adding annotations.
• They made some fairly recent improvements to how you sync animations and add annotations. With the timeline, you can manually move the timing around. Much better than the earlier task of having to just re-do it from the beginning and hope you get the timing right.
• If you're using Studio in the Articulate 360 subscription, you can easily review the course before it publishes.
• The included Quizmaker program is just great. Simple to use, but you can make a varied mix of questions, and the customization options are great.
• You can add background music in slides, which is pretty great in certain situations.

Incentivized

• Rubric Management. This may have been addressed in a plugin module.
• Better tools for examining outcomes from exams and rubrics across a class, course, or organization. This may have been addressed in a plugin module.
• Improved content management within the default installation. While there are modules that support products such as Drupal, building into the default product would ease adoption.

Incentivized

• It's icing on the cake. It provides a lot of usability with its quiz-maker and presenter. The presenter can sometimes feel like an unnecessary add on. If it didn't come apart of a package, I don't think we would have purchased it outright.

Incentivized

We use it because it is what have committed to back in 2011. Perhaps Moodle will evolve and advance in a positive way that will alleviate most of our user-based gripes? Perhaps it will not appear to be as cost effective given the need for a certain level of engineering and support staff to maintain it at a future level of sustainability? It's hard to say. As an enterprise scale critical application, we like it, but don't love it. Our instructors don't particularly like it at all.

There is very little chance that this software wold not be renewed. It has become an integral part of our standard software for elearning development.

Incentivized

I've been able to figure out Moodle through my own experimentation and some help from the Moodle support pages. It's not always obvious where to make certain some changes and It can be a little confusing in determining which pages blocks will appear. If this is your first time using Moodle as an admin/course designer you should expect to spend a some time experimenting because knowing where to make certain changes isn't always intuitive. Additionally, plan to explore the course as a student vs. as admin because the UI is different based upon your settings

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This is very useable software even for novice eLearning authoring users. People with some PowerPoint experience should be fine with this software and even Excel!

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I have worked in Moodle for over 10 years in two different organizations, and I have never experienced an outage. We have about 600 courses in our current account and the only outage we have had is FlashChat add-in we use for live chats, within Moodle, hence the reason for the nine (9). If you all know of Moodle vendors willing to help us upgrade from 1.9, Please wend me their info.

Incentivized

Moodle is an excellent LMS in relationship to any other one that I have seen or used. The pages load quickly and the reports complete in a reasonable time frame. Moodle has taken on Respondus, StudyMate, BigBlueButton, Turning Tech, Turnitin2, Certificates, Attendance, Tegrity, Questionnaire, Virtual Programming Lab, and Badges. All of these programs work right in with Moodle and do not cause any issues. Instructors may also use Camtasia and Snagit software as well as using webcams, downloading videos from the Internet, adding into books, or any of the many other areas within Moodle. Our instructors use the grade books without many problems and really don't ask questions much anymore. We upgrade Moodle every semester and are currently on 2.9+. Our instructors have basically learned to use most of the resources and activities.

Incentivized

I can consider Moodle as one of the pioneer in providing online learning. Before the introduction of other Learning Management Software, Moodle has been in place already in the field of education and so I believe that Moodle is definitely one of a kind software that all teachers should try and utilize in making sure that the online learning is a good experience.

Incentivized

If Articulate, as a company, would require their "community" "support" staff to open tickets on behalf of customers, then I would say that their support would deserve a 10. It's a huge gap between Articulate's management of their support compared to other companies; "support" staff are supposed to open tickets for you if they see the need, but Articulate's "community" "support" staff are prohibited from doing so. Instead, they will tell you that you should open a ticket when it should be their job!! This is just disrespectful of the reality of software support.

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I have used a few sites and they were adequate but my best learning experience was face to face and hands on.

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Find a partner who will work with you during the implementation process. Be sure to provide ample training for veteran users on the changes and for newbies on the overall product.

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Moodle, being open source, is the foundation a lot of other tools like it are based on. It provides almost all of the same functionality and feature set as Google Classtoom, Canvas, etc., although those products are a bit more polished. All can do content delivery, progress tracking, attendance, reporting, etc. with ease, but Moodle also does this as a completely open source product that can be code-reviewed, audited, modified, extended, etc. at will, provided the expertise is present.

Several Adobe products combine to do the work of just Articulate Storyline, which is part of Articulate Studio. The comparison is not really one that is easy to make but if you needed to do something with these Adobe products, all of them can be done with just Storyline. The beauty of Articulate Studio is that there are parts of the suite for which there is no match in Adobe such as Review 360 and Content Library 360.

Incentivized

Well, I administer Moodle for a dozen of our divisions and there is a wide range of flexibility between offerings. I have course instructors who use every module i their course, chock full of videos, pictures, links to web tools for synchronous sessions within the asynchronous course. I also have others who are content with a syllabus, a few pdfs, links to podcast lectures and a few simple assignments. No matter if your organization is big or small, or if your requirements are strict for credentialing or non-existent (for internal know-how), Moodle can accommodate you.

Incentivized

• Moodle has allowed the business to track all training initiatives. Since, November 2014 we have loaded 54 courses, 339 users, 889 resources, issued 719 badges, and created over 100 course modules.
• Our company just got a new applicant tracking system for the recruiters to use. In order to get all of the employees up to speed we created trainings that we loaded into Moodle. The participants and participation was tracked and we were able to find correlations between users engaged in training and their activity in the new applicant tracking system. This is a significant win for the training department, our learners, our company, and especially Moodle.
• Moodle also provides great customer service for our internal employees. They now have one place to go to find all their resources, all their training, and all the help they need for any training questions. Instead of scattering information on the intranet. Training is more official when it has its own domain.

Incentivized

• Prior to using this software, we were using a combination of other software, four in total, to accomplish the same task. Investing in Articulate Studio has saved us an annual cost of +$1,900 just in the software alone. Our ROI is less than 8 months as a result of the savings and time consumption saved by using one software and training on one software only.
• Having a lower impact on computer resources, Articulate Studio allowed us to install it on more users workstations that were not able to support other software. This reduced cost significantly by not requiring "mega computers" to run the software we previously used. Since Articulate Studio runs so smoothly, we can purchase standard workstations and it runs great on them.
• Having new employees join the team and training them on producing training courses has never been easier. They only require 3 days of training in Articulate Studio vs. two weeks we needed previously to train on 3 different software to accomplish the same tasks.

Incentivized