Refreshing the authoring tool convo- Lectora anyone?

Hey @Lisa C. 

Lectora used to be the cadillac of tools with a premium pricing and an awesome level of templating that (my opinion) no other platform could touch. I worked with it briefly to support a researcher that authored a course at the health system that I worked at. It was pretty darn good and hit many of the right notes. I struggled with some of the pre-baked interactions...because they had very little wiggle space to improvise.

Articulate/Adobe elearning authoring platforms used to come in at a more modest price point. But the gaps are closing with few options and more subscription model types of pricing being pushed at us. And now even Articulate/Adobe really upping their game in the ready baked assets and a set of interactions that rival Lectoras.

Beyond that one experience like 8 years ago? I haven’t put Lectora through the deeper ringer because of running shops that were primarily supporting Articulate authoring tools (Rise/Storyline outputs) or Abobe authoring tools (Presenter/Presenter Video Express/Captivate).

They are all beginning to blur now though…from my perspective if your shop is looking to adopt the tool?

There are key things to consider:

• Are the SCORM cmi interactions coming across clearly to the LMS?
• Are the tools impacting your speed to product in a negative or positive way?
• NEW to the convo - Is your platform being supported by a layer of generative AI for generating content?
• Can you get others in your shop to adopt? You definitely do not want a single person using an authoring tool (ideally) with a broader ID shop. If two or more arent using it and someone cant write up a best practice for publishing? Consider that your adoption may need to go a bit further before putting that course in production.
• Dont sneeze at Docebo Shape. It keeps on getting love by Docebo as a content generating platform..

I have been suggesting there are other tools out there in the rapid elearning development/design ecosystem that are cloud based doing very interesting things in the xAPI space. Gradebooks can be tracked externally with these tools and you can even play the course over on site A? to have it recorded in Docebos learning record store.

Freebies like h5p.org have SCORM output projects.

And then there is this whole layer of light LMS course development softwares out there. 

Lectora definitely does not get a full boo or a knock anymore. The pricing at the time closed the door on it. I couldnt get more to adopt it. It may be time to revisit.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane.

I used Lectora in the past and had my company kick it to the curb in favor of Articulate360. Best decision we ever made. Much easier for the team to use. While Lectora is a functionality powerhouse in terms of what you can do with it, it is very, very difficult to get anything pretty out of it. We also use Camtasia, Vyond, Creative Cloud, and Character Animator as well. Rise is one of our main workhorses. You would do well with Articulate.