Comparisons and advocacy

If you are happy with using software that outpus SCORM then iSpring is as good as an possibly better than most. I experimented with it on and off over many years and they have free sampler/trial versions of some of their stuff, some of it very functional so you can get a good feel for what it does.

However I have found SCORM to be annoyingly unreliable over the years. Typically it works fine in testing and then when you have 20 students taking a quiz one or two of them may find that their score was not recorded. In the next session it might work fine.  I would never consider it for high stakes testing.

The free Moodle quiz can do much more in terms of functionality and is highly reliable. However it is certainly not as pretty as a typical SCORM output.

Dianne, do have a look at alternatives too both free and premium ones. like other applications that could create SCORM packages are Articulate Studio and Lectora Inspire.

and on Free side, have you thought of trying H5P? as it is feature full and is free, gives output in HTML5, also has a plug-in for moodle.

Hi Dianne,

I've used iSpring for a couple of years and found it easy to use and fairly bug free. I've recently started using the H5P plugin and found it to be more flexible although somewhat buggy at times. There are workarounds but its annoying.

iSpring PROS:

1. Works as an add-in within PowerPoint and supports most of the animation features. So if you know how to use PowerPoint, you can use iSpring.
2. The presentation templates offer a lot of options and look very professional. Options like pop-up table of contents, author info, company logo & links are all easy to add and look great.
3. The audio and video narration & editing tools are very good
4. Lots of features to enhance the presentation (characters, animations, interactions, etc)
5. Quiz question options are quite good and integrate well in Moodle
6. Lots of output options including SCORM
7. Output is portable to any LMS and can even be self-contained (very handy for training videos on DVD or YouTube/Vimeo)

iSpring CONS:

1. SCORM output is somewhat responsive for mobile devices but not nearly as flexible as H5P. The aspect ratio is fixed at output time from PowerPoint.
2. The information passed to Moodle from the quizzes is not nearly as detailed at the native Moodle quiz modules
3. It can get expensive if you need more than the 2 licenses included with the suite package and they've recently switched to an optional annual maintenance package that runs several hundred dollars per year.

In the end it boils down to what you need from it. If you're just going to use iSpring to produce SCORM packages for Moodle, I'd give the H5P plugin a try as it can do most of the things iSpring can do and its free. Keep in mind H5P is a work in progress but it is still very good and is constantly being improved and updated. The only downside that I can see is that it is not portable between systems ... yet.

cheers,

Derek