Articulate a Microcourse for Something (I chose Teams)

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Welcome to Teams - a tiny primer

Late Impressions:

Using Articulate was something of an eye-opener to me. I have used a course builder software that developed from an open source product into one that is now profit based, and it is far clunkier than Articulate. I have also seen other people online who have created courses and felt wowed by their ability to design such stream-lined and visually pleasing experiences. Seeing that a lot of what I considered WOW factors are now WYSWG type building experiences in this product takes a lot of mystique out of how people are able to do that and the skills it actually takes, versus the ones I was making assumptions it took.

With that, I felt a loss of personability within Articulate. It felt like I was being inducted into the Adobe brand over promoting the content I was creating my course for (admittedly still a large brand, lol). It was not hard to pattern a course after one of the templates, or to fall into the writing tone provided by the templates, or feel very supported in creating a pretty consistent learning experience. I appreciated that on the whole - considering that an efficiently designed nice-looking course is effective at educating.

My ego wants to argue this point, because I am often a personality that likes to reinvent the wheel because I value the process more than the product. In acknowledging my hesitation though it allows me to wonder if this type of design tool is creating a rather deceptive idea that our learners are all primed to have authentic learning experiences with this type of tool. It all felt very Instagram worthy, and for a course that I was not as personally curious about, or multiple of them, I think the nature of that would make it difficult to take any topic very seriously. It would make everything feel rather emotionless, and/or like I was taking in information like a sugar-coated pill. In that way I think if I were to use this product in the future I would definitely want to consider the audience, intent, and outcome hoped for when designing my course, which ultimately is what we are meant to do anyway, but I can see how I might fall into the trap of not critically reflecting as deeply in using Articulate because everything runs so simple, pretty, and smooth.