Lectora is an eLearning authoring tool that produces courses in web, SCORM, and AICC formats. Lectora, like its Articulate and Captivate counterparts, does a great job giving you a blank canvas to populate with your content. While there is a slight learning curve to development, anyone who is familiar with PowerPoint would feel comfortable creating pages (or Titles as they are called in Lectora), and publishing to SCORM, or AICC compliant formats.

Lectora Creates Websites
eLearning does not require SCORM/AICC compliancy to work with an LMS or help educate. Sometimes you need to present your content as a simple website. Lectora is different than Articulate and Captivate in that it creates what most people would consider a standard website, in that it is HTML based, rather than Flash based. In fact, you can use Lectora as a website creator to create a website with a menu, pages, and even some form capabilities. When you publish a Lectora file in a simple web format, it creates all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript – all the goodies that make a website work under the hood. While this can be helpful bringing your course to your website, be aware that editing the code itself is not as easy.
Lectora Accepts both Actionscript 2 and 3
You don’t have to know how to use Adobe Flash to know that Actionscript 2 and 3 are not always compatible with each other. Many of our clients have told us they have had to deal with the headaches of older Flash based knowledge checks and assessments not working with their newer systems. Actionscript is the programming language Flash uses to create interactive applications. Actionscript 3 is the newer version of the language. Articulate requires the use of Actionscript 2 and Captivate requires Actionscript 3. Both of these packages publish out to a fully encapsulated Flash project. Lectora, on the other hand, publishes out to a series of web based HTML pages which are individual to each other. Because of this, each page can have a different Flash component of either Actionscript 2 or 3.

Lectora Has Variables
Variables are simply a stored number or string of characters. Let’s say you have a page with three buttons that popup additional information about a topic. You would like someone to have to click all three before moving to the next page. You need to somehow store which buttons have been clicked and, if they were all clicked, enable a Next button and allow the user to move on to the next page. Variables are how we store these values. Lectora has simple programming capabilities which will allow you to easily create a stored variable, and later check to see what that variable is. You can set the initial value of a variable to be false and when a user clicks a popup button, set the variable to true. Now when the user clicks the Next button you can easily check to see if that variable is now true, meaning the user has viewed the popup. Let us know if you ever need any help getting started with Variables in Lectora.

Lectora certainly has good and bad characteristics and we would recommend it in certain situations but not in others. There are a lot of good comparisons between Lectora, Articulate, Captivate, and many other eLearning programs that can help you determine what is best for you. And we are always happy to throw in our two-cents as well.