Sherri at UNLV is looking for other opinions…
Comments on Macromedia Captivate & Qarbon ViewletBuilder?
I’m currently evaluating tutorial software for both instruction (emphasis: tutorials, scoring and evalution mechanisms) and distance education (emphasis: not so much the scoring aspect but learning and instructional applications). I’ve worked previously with Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder and really enjoyed the simplicity and ease of use. I’ve also been taking a closer look at Macromedia’s Captivate. Only thing is, I haven’t had a lot of experience using it and haven’t had a lot of luck finding too many reviews that are written from the academic eLearning perspective. We currently have two licenses of Camtasia Studio installed on workstations that are available for public use (not ideal for staff), but I’ve never been a fan of Camtasia anyway.
Robin Good offers a comprehensive comparison of ViewletBuilder and Camtasia in "Creating interactive learning tutorials for software"
Leave a comment if you have experiences that you’d like to share in using any of these (or other unmentioned) software packages.
Comments
6 Responses to “Comments on Macromedia Captivate & Qarbon ViewletBuilder?”
Great initiative!
We used Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder developing demos for our Information Literacy Tutorial at http://vink.hit.no/. Some comments on the work in progress: http://home.no.net/punkt/info/arkiv/cat_viewlets.php (in Norwegian, sorry…).
Compared to the freeware WINK I think ViewletBuilder is well worth the money. However the software has a lot of weaknesses (as pointed out in your previous posts on ViewletBuilder), but not so many that we’ve found it worthwhile checking out other alternatives.
There was a “Demo software wrap-up” on the ILI-list on November 17 2004. Most of the librarians seemed to prefer Camtasia.
Regards,
Jørn
I used Captivate to build a set of interactive tutorials aimed at techno-novices using an academic journals database. We evaluated several options prior to selecting Captivate, including Camtasia and Viewlet. Captivate worked great for me – it was so simple to include interactivity. There are a few troublesome quirks that will hopefully get ironed out under the stewardship of Macromedia: First, it is PC only. Drat. Second, there is no “library” like there is in Flash – if you make an object that you want to use over and over, there’s nowhere to put it. You’ll have to cut and paste which may or may not preserve all its properties. Third, with more than 50 slides or so, you’re almost guaranteed for it to crash or hang. However, in the scheme of things, these are minor complaints, and I found Captivate to be the most user-friendly way to produce a very professional-looking product. The tutorials are still being tested, so they’re not available anywhere public yet, unfortunately.
Thanks for the lead on the ILI (Information Literacy Instruction) list, Jørn. I tracked down the archives on the ALA website (what a pain – first I had to register, and THEN they told me I needed to subscribe before I could see the archives). I read the Nov 17 posting and my interpretation was that most of the folks were leaning towards Captivate (or Robo Demo, as the product used to be called). There were some links in there to the following demo sites: (which I have yet to check out)
http://www.muskingum.edu/~awhitis/dlo.html
http://www.ulib.csuohio.edu/help/hands-on/
http://www.lib.panam.edu/libserv/tutorials/index.asp
http://www.lib.panam.edu/loex/
thanks again for the pointer
RPR, good points about the shortcomings of Captivate – that library idea is a good one! I had someone else looking for a Mac solution to these flash-based tutorials, and I heard from the folks at Qarbon that they were planning to release a Mac version of the ViewletBuilder sometime this summer. If they do, I’ve got to think Macromedia won’t be too far behind!
Unfortunately our experience with ViewletBuilder was disastrous. We too wanted to use it for creating library electronic services tutorials and liked the idea of no requirement for flash to be installed. However, we found that after a certain number of slides (say 50) – and hours of work, VB would crash and corrupt the file you were working on so it couldn’t be reopened or recovered. VB Support tried but was unable to rescue the file and after it happened 3 times and they were unable to give a satisfactory reason for this happening, we gave up and asked for our money back – which (surprise surprise!) they have consisitently ignored our requests for. My advice is don’t buy it if you value your sanity.
I too await an OSX client, having seen the last Mac (OS9) client disappears with v1 of VersionBuilder. Last week Qarbon support answered a query about a Mac client with…
“The Macintosh version will be available the first week in May.”
Well it’s Friday of week 1 in May. I hope this isn’t vapourware. Qarbon previously claimed (in direct communications with them) that they were producing an OSX client for Panther but it never came. I guess this will mean upgrading to Tiger.
Hope this helps.