Limbic Learning

Review area

How did Composica do?

Rating

Ease of use

For someone with good basic IT skills but who is not a developer.

The out-of-the-box functionality is pretty easy to use. However, it is trickier to figure out how to customise it all without training in how to use the application.

3/5

Flexible & Scalable

Should allow you to build different levels of interactivity depending on your project. Getting the right balance between ready-made 'out-of-the-box' functionality and the flexibility to customise your e-learning as much as you would like.

Setting up new projects

Setting up a new project and publishing it is very quick. If you need to pull something together in a hurry, you can import existing Power Points and then add interactivity to each screen if you want to.

Look and feel

There are a number in-built 'out-of-the-box' looks that you can use right away, although I found them to be a unsophisticated to look at, in a rush they would do.

4/5

Features

Good in-built functionality. That saves you time and maybe even provides a little inspiration.

The first thing to note is that all the functionality is 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get' you don't need to have developer skills or understand code, which is great.

The application uses styles to create consistency which if you are making a customised project you define yourself. However, you have to manually associate every piece of text to a style which is a bit time consuming - a drop-down list within the onscreen text boxes would save time here.

Screen types

There are a number of in-built screen types as well such as multiple choice questions, hot graphics, drag and drop and a variety of games, which are pretty easy to use. Making your own screen interactivity is possible using a combination of existing functionality, the suite of PowerPoint type transitions you can add to any object and a feature called 'widgets'. The games are not customisable other than to add in your own content.

Main menu

The biggest drawback, in my opinion is that it is very tricky to customise the main menu to make it fit the look and feel you might have planned.

4/5

Reusable

A good tool will allow you to import existing materials easily as well as reuse components between one e-learning course and another.

I think Composica scores highly in this area - it's quite easy to create your own library of screen types in your customised look and feel and then copy them into your project when you need to.

Every project, screen or media has tags that you can assign and search for later, which is good as you might want to reuse content as well as functionality.

5/5

Media management

You should be able to organise your media (graphics, videos, audio etc) easily. So that you can reuse them when necessary and replace them easily.

Composica allows you to upload a variety of media (audio, animation, video, graphics etc) and assign tags to each one. I think it's great for enabling you to reuse items within or across projects.

I didn't give this 5 stars as I still feel some work could be done to improve the media management tool to make it faster and easier to categorise and find items.

5/5

Collaboration and project management tools

In the past the main difficulty with authoring tools was that only one person could develop the course at a time - so if, as with many projects, you had separate people working on the graphics, content checking, an e-learning designer, a client reviewing etc. They would all have to wait their turn, which of course would be very time consuming and frustrating!

Now, I would expect a good tool to allow multiple access and roles to a course in development as well as a way to assign tasks to each other.

There are some great collaboration features in Composica which they call 'social authoring'.

Composica is web based and not stored locally which means you can have developers, reviewers or anyone else accessing and working on the course from anywhere.

There is a task management system, where you can allocate tasks to different members of the project team linked to specific pages in the course.

There is a group chat functionality, blog and project dash board which you could you use to post project milestones etc.

The collaboration features are great and huge step in the right direction. However, assigning tasks has to be done whilst in development mode whereas I know I would have found it more useful if my not-so computer confident focus group members could have added their comments directly to the published screens.

4/5

Assessment

You should be able to add quizzes/tests and question banks easily and quickly.

Composica enables you to add tests or quizzes very easily and there are a number of useful options that you can choose for these. Such as to have a question bank, to be able to choose how many 'tries' people can have at a question or change the scoring weight for certain questions. For example an easy question might be worth 1 point and a more challenging 5 points.

The only drawback is that I think there could be more questions types.

4/5

SCORM

It shouldn't give you a headache when you try to publish it to your LMS or website.

When you go to publish a project in Lectora there are a number of options - you can publish to a hosted web server, SCORM 1.2 or 2004 content package, Zip file, Installation package or an executable.

5/5

In-built help

There should be an in-built help feature. That you can search to answer ad-hoc queries.

When you buy a tool from a supplier you should also expect to have reasonable human support options such as - a day or two of face-to-face training, or telephone support within business hours. Sometimes these are billed as extras and sometime not.

Although Composica isn't difficult to use it's also not necessarily intuitive and it's likely that you'll have lots of little 'how do I do x or y' type queries when you get down to the detail.

The in-built help in my view, is poor. It doesn't have a keyword search feature and the general structure of the help section isn't logical to me so I spent a lot of time looking for information that should have been more readily available.

I would definitely recommend opting for a day of training and telephone support so that you get the hang of it quickly and easily and have someone on call if you need them.

3/5