What is Lectora Inspire and Why
Should I Check it Out?
First of all, I would like to
share that I have used a few different authoring tools including Adobe
Captivate, Articulate Storyline, Brainshark, and Harbinger Raptivity. Even so,
I continue to be impressed by what Lectora Inspire has to offer. Lectora Inspire (a product of
Trivantis/eLearning Brothers) offers a user friendly and flexible approach to
the development of online courses. It is very intuitive and allows the
instructional designer to create interactive, engaging, and
professional-looking online courses.
My Top 10 Features and Benefits
1. Lectora
Inspire offers integrated versions of SnagIt and Camtasia as part of the
application to handle screen captures and simulations.
2. It
includes a PowerPoint Integrator for converting presentations to a clean
eLearning format – great for the development of rapid eLearning.
3. Offers
an intuitive user interface – containing a ribbon with buttons, options, and
tabs similar to other MS Office products.
4. Built
in designs. Although I chose to create a custom skin/template using my
company’s corporate colors and logo, Lectora Inspire contains over 70 built-in
themes for ease of development as well as templates to help with page layout
and design. I saved my custom skin as a template so that I can easily use it
for future courses that I develop as part of my new hire orientation.
5. Easily
incorporate graphics and media to enhance your course.
6. Contains
a library of characters to add to your eLearning course.
7. Contains
various wizards to help you perform common tasks like creating an action,
adding a background, or adding a button.
8. Ability
to publish is various formats including SCORM, AICC, exe, and HTML.
9. Ability
to easily create tests, assessments, and surveys as well as other
interactivities to engage the learner and improve retention.
10. Offers access to online tutorials, samples courses, and
communities/forums to help you to get started.
What Do I Need to Know?
Getting started with developing
courses using Lectora Inspire is easy.
Although it is recommend that you attend a training session to get the
most out of your authoring experience, anyone with experience using MS Office
products should be able to jump right in and begin. The best way I can explain it, is that it
offers functionality of both MS Word and MS PowerPoint. With this prerequisite knowledge, the
learning curve is somewhat minimal. I was able to create my course by trial and
error and by using the intuitive Help feature.
Below is a link to eLearning White
Papers offered on the Trivantis website. They seem to add new resources
regularly and many of them offer some great information related to online
learning.
http://trivantis.com/e-learning-white-papers
A Few Limitations to Consider…
Although I would recommend Lectora
Inspire to any instruction designer/content developer regardless of their
experience, there are a few limitations worth noting. The Lectora Inspire tool is somewhat
expensive. In my case, my company purchased the license for me. For personal use, it would not be an option
for many, unless they went with their online, cloud-based offering which can be
much more budget-friendly and cost-effective.
Also, this authoring tool does not
have the ability to create or manage a built-in timeline. Often timelines will help the designer to
stay on task. This type of project management would need to be done outside of
Lectora. For my pilot project, having the ability to manager my overall project
timeline within the application itself would have been helpful so that I can
stay on schedule easily.
Finally, the tech support offered
is a bit weak and the support staff is not as knowledgeable about the product
as I would hope. Their responses do not resolve the issue or point you in the
right direction and overall response time in general was somewhat slow based on
my experience. Luckily, the tool is
intuitive so as the author, you can typically resolve issues independently and
also take advantage of the Help feature and user community which seems to be
very knowledgeable.
