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To Buy or Not To Buy: Atlantic Link Suite Product Review
August 01, 2008
Reviewed by Richard Naish, Qi Concepts Limited
By Richard Naish
Product: Atlantic Link Content Point, Capture Point, and Knowledge Point
Rating: 4 stars out of 4
Contact: Atlantic Link, 678-762-3360, www.atlantic-link.co.uk
List price: $9,000
Review: "In five years' time the new landscape of e-learning may look something like this…Organizations will be developing their own e-learning content using authoring tools that are as user-friendly as PowerPoint." I wrote that in October 2003 in my e.learningage magazine column. Well, my five years is up, so it is time to see how well my crystal ball was working in 2003.
A Powerful Program for Large Companies
In today's fast-moving global environment, organizations must be able to up-skill their global workforces quickly, successfully, and inexpensively. E-learning can be a very effective way to do this. But e-learning programs have traditionally been developed by a third party, an approach that takes longer and costs more than if they were developed in-house.
Now, though, rapid e-learning development products are available to enable organizations to develop e-learning programs in-house. Some, like Atlantic Link, are designed and priced for use by large organizations, while others, like Captivate or Camtasia, are designed and priced for use by organizations of any size.
Rapid e-learning can help organizations in three important ways:
• Timely deployment. Sometimes getting the content "out there" to the target audience in an easy-to-understand format is more important than building something big and expensive. An organization creates a new product or service, for example, and thousands of field sales staff need to be trained quickly, before the launch day. The cost of failing to train the staff would be huge: failure to sell the new product or service would mean a loss of revenue and brand value. Clearly, this type of information-led learning lends itself to rapid e-learning development.
• Early prototyping. To gain stakeholders' commitment to a new large-scale e-learning program, a model that demonstrates the potential value of the program can be quickly developed. Such a prototype makes it easy to get stakeholder buy-in from different parts of the organization—and in most large organizations, wide-scale buy-in is now a prerequisite for all expensive e-learning programs.
• Content control. Rapid development tools bring the "content owner" (the person who is most motivated to disseminate the content) closer to the e-learning presentation of the content. The content owner can work directly with the in-house team and thus maintain a high degree of control over the learning material. Rather than reviewing work created by external consultants, internal experts make more decisions about how to present the content. Sometimes even the subject matter experts (SMEs) can use the tools themselves to create an information-based program on their subject. This practice can reduce costs because development is handled primarily by just one person.
A Closer Look at the Atlantic Link Suite
The Atlantic Link product suite has three components that work together:
• Content Point
• Capture Point
• Knowledge Point
• Because Content Point is software you run while connected to the Internet, teams can develop material together, even if they are in different locations and different time zones around the world.
However, when someone is working on a particular element of a course, the element is locked to other users until the first user saves it back to the server. That way, you avoid having two or more people making changes to the same version of a course at the same time.
• Capture Point allows an expert in a software program used by his or her organization to create e-learning that walks a novice user through the software interface and functions. It acts like a video camera capturing the author's interactions with the software. Authors can add text explanations and audio clips that they record themselves using a microphone plugged into their computer.
• Knowledge Point enables users to access the learning programs and track progress and test scores using their Web browsers. It can be customized for organizations so that the learning portal carries the organization's branding and the same "look and feel" as its Intranet.
The use of Internet-based software for authoring e-learning is a major strength of the Atlantic Link product suite. The power of e-learning has always been its accessibility to learners, who can access the training from any location at any time convenient to them, as long as they have a computer and Internet connection.
Now, this strength is mirrored on the content creation side. Teams located in different parts of the world can create content. The content development team may be based in one country, the programming team in another, and the end users in several countries around the world.
The product's workflow management features are particularly useful. Large projects with multiple team members who are not co-located must have good project management. With this software's workflow tools, a team member can add an issue to be fixed, and the project manager can assign the job of fixing it to another team member. When that team member next logs in to the software, he or she can clearly see the newly assigned task.
Content Point also addresses the important issue of creating e-learning content appropriate for people with accessibility needs. With one click in Atlantic Link, the content is accessible through screen readers.
The Worldwide Web Consortium has established levels of accessibility standards that Websites and Web-based e-learning can achieve. The Atlantic Link software will make e-learning "AA compliant." This means the "text and graphics are understandable when viewed without color" and the "content conveys essentially the same function or purpose as auditory or visual content."
Typically, organizations have a lot of legacy learning material that, for the sake of efficiency, is recycled into e-learning material. With Atlantic Link, you can quickly import legacy material in the form of a PowerPoint slide presentation, edit the content to increase its interactivity, and then disseminate it to target learners as a stand-alone program or as part of a larger training program.
The software has an impressive number of features—hotspots, videos, quizzes—that developers can use to augment content.
Content Point and Capture Point content are SCORM 1.2 compliant. The program has search-only embedded help. Full online tutorials are available. Phone and e-mail support is included in the annual maintenance fee.
Recommendation
The Atlantic Link suite of products can be very useful for organizations with distributed workforces that need to be continually trained and kept up to date and a distributed team of SMEs who can supply the content for that training. Given the rise of globalization and the power of the Internet, these characteristics apply to most large organizations. They should put Atlantic Link on their short list of rapid e-learning development tools.
Richard Naish is managing director of Qi Concepts Limited, and designs immersive learning simulations for organizations. He is a business psychologist with 20 years experience in people development and e-learning. He started his career as a chartered accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in London before he became a training manager and then an independent e-learning consultant. Naish also is a regular columnist for e.learningage magazine and a judge for Brandon Hall e-learning awards. He can be reached at richard.naish@qiconcepts.co.uk.
This review was provided by Training Media Review (TMR), an online service, located at www.tmreview.com, that is designed to help training and HR professionals find quality off-the-shelf products through practitioner reviews. TMR also features tips related to new products such as how to use social networking and virtual reality tools to enhance learning. Subscribers receive free reports, including Leading Authoring Tools, Best Training Products, and Best Books on Training. For more information, visit https://secure.awsystems.com/tmreview/_secure/join_renew.asp.
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