One cannot live on Camtasia alone (well…maybe)

Most of us have a favorite application for a particular task. Whether for the ease of use, price, vendor customer service or some other reason, the preferred product will be in place until it becomes obsolete (in my head I hear the actor from The Twilight Zone, original series, B&W).

TechSmith Camtasia, Screencast and Snagit have been my go-to eLearning applications since…well, it has been a while. I am not prepared to change by any means but given the highly competitive market, I am adding new applications to my knowledge base, and reacquainting myself with those that are familiar, like the Articulate products.

My first experience with Articulate was with the Presenter product. With Articulate 360, the vendor, like many software companies, has gone the route of offering monthly or annual subscriptions for a hybrid of desktop and cloud products. For instructional design professionals Storyline is an alternative to Camtasia for developing and enhancing the eLearning experience.

My initial impression of this version, known as Articulate 360, is that the product offering is complete: it includes all the tools necessary to create an effective project. My second impression is that Storyline is the new Presenter (which always mimicked the PowerPoint GUI) so I felt right at home when I opened it.

I peeked into Storyline to create a single scene. In my opinion, the most valuable elements of the application were the libraries of characters and illustrations. The characters—both photos and animations—have multiple poses to make the scenes more interesting.

Aside from the characters, I do not see any advantages over competing products. Nevertheless, I decided to check out the pricing to consider a paid subscription after my free trial ends. To make a long Story(line) short, the freelancer pricing was the motivation for my sample scene below.

Enough said. Let me know what you’re using to build your eLearning presentations and lessons. Let’s share ideas!