Why are these applications used?
Such e-learning tools enhance the learning process a great deal: the interactive, visually-appealing multimedia materials that can be produced with Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker can be studied at the user's own pace, they can incorporate meaningful feedback from the materials designer and can cater for a variety of learning styles, to mention only three advantages.
The following types of materials can be designed and delivered using the Articulate Studio components:
- Teaching materials (UG, Masters, PG)
- Research presentations
- Student presentations
- Promotional materials
- Induction information
- Study skills support
- Health and safety training
What do the University of Leeds users actually say about Articulate?
"I have just listened to your presentation, it was fantastic and I really enjoyed it; I even made my mum listen to it. This will help my revision greatly. Thank you."
The Articulate presentations "[...] are just like real lectures, very useful for revision and preparation for seminars." Having access to a "[...] written script, the possibility to resume when the presentation is closed, [being able to view the presentations] in Firefox, too, [...] and the option to search through each presentation are also very useful."
"This certainly worked well for me. The actual tool worked well – no technical hitches. The delivery – watching the slides listening to the voice over – was very familiar as I spend a lot of time listening to PowerPoint presentations. I think this approach makes learning easier for me than purely some written notes. The written note approach is somewhat close to notes I take from the text book anyway, the slides plus voice over seem to add an extra dimension – making it easier to learn (multiple dissimilar channels), and also making me look at the material from slightly different perspectives."
"I think it is an excellent idea. It is really valuable for taking in extra information not on the powerpoint presentation that the lecturer has said that you might have missed at the time, also for looking back at the explanation of diagrams. Also it just generally helps with learning the material in the lecture. Although you can go back over the notes alone you can never go back to the lecture. Hearing and reading the material again compared to solely reading it again helps with memory. It can also help with understanding if there was something you weren't clear the first time. Which can happen if your writing some extra notes down and momentarily fall a slide behind.
Hypothetically if such audio/video notes were introduced for all lectures I think it would definitely increase exam performance in a good percentage of students."
"Articulate is exceptionally easy to use, if you know how to use PowerPoint you already know how to use Articulate! The School of Chemistry has used it to put together some safety training material and distribute it in one go to over 300 students and researchers. We would never have been able to train this many people individually and so the e-learning route has proved exceptionally valuable as well as being quick and easy to develop."
"Articulate is useful to introduce students to online learning. It can help the department to provide supplementary and additional teaching sessions in a way which saves time for teachers and encourages student-directed self-managed learning."
"The main features we like about Articulate is that it's intuitive, quick, and works with PowerPoint, which seems to be the one visual program which everyone can use. PowerPoint is an excellent program for screen presentations but produces horrible HTML code by itself, whereas Articulate does an excellent job of handling the Microsoft quirks and producing something professional looking and accessible to most."
"Articulate is surprisingly easy to use and excellent for making your research accessible and understandable."
"In this School more and more lecturers are taking advantage of the potential in using this software and can see how Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker can make the learning experience much more interactive and rich for our students who provide us with much positive feedback."
"I have been using Articulate presenter with some online teaching material and have found it a very useful and effective package. It offers great diversity and flexibility with teaching material."
"I have been using Articulate as part of our online MA in Asia Pacific Studies. The students enjoyed this new form of learning and teaching as it supports student engagement and motivation. It adds a new dimension of online based teaching provision and definitely made for a new learning experience which students greatly enjoyed. I am sure that this software can be used in a variety of ways particularly in complementing key aspects of lectures."
"We've used Articulate Presenter (AP) extensively in the last couple of years in order to support learning in the field of Human anatomy... Its ease-of-use is reflected not just in the extensive portfolio of online materials that we've been able to produce, but also in the fact that we've been able to deploy it as a tool for students to use themselves within the context of a Level 3 project-based module. The learning resources produced by the students using AP have been of a consistently high standard and have featured elements such as videos, 2D and 3D animations, interactive Flash movies, photographs, diagrams and audio narration all brought together within the AP interface in order to illustrate and explain particular aspects of clinical anatomy."
"Articulate is fabulously easy to use. It is such a straightforward application, yet can really enhance teaching and learning – from creating more interesting lecture notes for the Portal to acting as study skills refreshers. We in POLIS are hoping to develop, with the Skills Centre, short presentations to help students with the age-old sticking points such as referencing correctly/plagiarism, preparing for exams, giving presentations etc."
"I think Articulate is good, and the conversion process is quick, and the quality of the converted files is also good - I use not only text but images as well tables and diagrams. Everything is swiftly and accurately converted."
"In Dentistry we have been using Articulate Presenter for over 4 years now and the majority of our lectures to 1st and 2nd year students (and many in 3rd year) are via Presenter. Presenter's main attractions when I first started using it were its extreme ease of use and the professional-looking output it produces, and those attributes still apply. The early version of Quizmaker was rather less successful but the latest version is very much improved. One feature I have been working with is its ability to integrate small self assessment sessions into a Presenter presentation and control the student's progress through the lecture - something which, on the basis of admittedly very limited feedback so far, is popular with the students. Another useful trick is the ability to incorporate flash sequences produced in Presenter into Quizmaker questions.
"I found Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker very easy to use. Articulate has allowed my colleagues and me to take existing PowerPoint presentations and record narration. The presentations can then be loaded onto the Nathan Bodington VLE."
"We are experimenting with the capabilities of the software and to date have incorporated audio and video, in addition to animating text or visuals into presentations. We have found Articulate to be an easy piece of software to use because the authoring interface is clear and the help documentation is informative."
