Harbinger Raptivity: Packaged Interactivity

This is the second of a series of articles on specific tools that are in use in the e-Learning industry. For a quick introduction to the series, please see the first article http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/420/tool-overview-questionmark-perception

Raptivity is the main product offering from Harbinger Knowledge Products Inc. It allows you to create over 225 types of interactions, each of which can be customized to a good degree using a built-in wizard and a parameters table.

Each interaction is published as a Flash SWF file so that you can play it independently or so that you can insert it into any authoring environment that accepts SWF files. You don’t use Raptivity to build whole courses; rather, you build rich interactivity with it, one interaction at a time.

Unless you plan on delivering interactions singly, such as you might in a classroom or as part of a website, you will need an authoring platform to create your courses. You can then use Raptivity to enrich your courses by providing higher levels of interactivity than are possible or that are not as easy to create in your authoring tool.

First released in 2005, Raptivity is now up to version 5.5. This follows the trend of most good software packages of having a major release about once a year. It requires Windows XP or later and .NET Framework 2.0 (which you can download for free from http://microsoft.com). There are no versions of Raptivity for OS X or Linux.

Raptivity packs

Raptivity has an essential set of interactions and a number of packs, which you purchase separately. You must start with Raptivity Essential if you wish to install any of the Raptivity packs. The Zest Pack costs $400 and you can buy any of the other add-on packs as you wish. The cost for all packs is about $4,000. There are no additional costs associated with Raptivity, so you can create as many interactions as you like and deliver to as many learners as you like.

Each of the packs contains a different amount of interactions. Since there are more than 230 interactions (as of version 5.5), if you purchase all the packs you may find that you never use some of the interactions. It’s normal to settle on a subset for your needs but it’s also very nice to know that there are others available to you for those rarer times when your design might vary from your standard approaches. Think of how you use your word processor. You probably only use a quarter of all its features on a regular basis but once in a while you find yourself using a feature that normally you don’t need.

In speaking with instructional designers who use Raptivity, there appears to be a general consensus that Raptivity’s biggest asset is its wealth of interactions. It makes one positively dizzy!

The interactions are broken down into the categories in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Raptivity interaction categories

Table 1 shows a breakdown of the categories contained in each pack.

Using Raptivity

We should start with a basic question: do I need to be a programmer to use Raptivity? The answer is decidedly no. There is no scripting or programming involved.

Second question: do I need to be an instructional designer? The answer here is a little more complicated. The more you know about instructional design, the better use you’ll make of Raptivity’s interactions. Just as is true of any tool, Raptivity can deliver any instructional design, including awful instructional design. In other words, if you choose interactions based just on what you think is cool or based on how pretty an interaction is, you will probably end up with some pretty bad e-Learning as a result.

Knowing good instructional design means that you will focus on your audience and content needs and then choose the best interactions to meet those needs. Therefore, don’t expect to hand Raptivity (or any tool) to someone not well-versed in instructional design and expect miracles. The results might be pretty but not help learners in the least. In the hands of a good instructional designer, though, Raptivity can help raise one’s design to higher levels and help learners learn more quickly.

Each interaction uses a wizard to get you started. You enter the text and load the media that you need to include. The wizard is pretty much the same for each interaction, which means that once you get the hang of a wizard (which doesn’t take long), you’ll find the approach used for the others is pretty similar. There is also a Detailed Customization option which lets you further fine-tune any given interaction in the interaction editor using parameter tables. Don’t worry – it’s all pretty easy.

The resulting interactions are attractive and can be very sound instructionally. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2: Interactions in Raptivity can be visually attractive and instructionally sound.

Accessibility

If you need to deliver interactivity that is Section 508 compliant, note that not all Raptivity interactions are compliant. However, over 30 of them are. Most of them are in the Essential pack but there are a few in other packs. (See Table 2, below.)

Comments

Login or subscribe to comment

Related Articles

Beginning Instructional Authoring: Say What? Explaining Images

1/13/11

Are you just beginning to learn how to author e-Learning? This column is meant for you! Patti Shank serves up some tool-independent and tool-specific tips in this series that will help you work better and faster, and develop a better product. This month, Patti shows you four tips for avoiding cognitive overload.

Beta Testing an Online Course

1/11/10

Beta Testing is a key step in creating insanely great e-Learning applications. Often overlooked or omitted out of concern for budget and schedule, it is actually simple and cheap to do, and when planned with care it takes little time to execute. Done before development is 100% complete, it ensures faultless releases. Here’s a step-by-step guide from an experienced developer.

Creating Great Stories to Enhance e-Learning

2/14/05

Stories offer an effective and low-cost way to immerse learners in complex experiences, and to help them relate content to previous knowledge. A well-written story helps learners make sense out of new information. Read this article, by an experienced writer and e-Learning designer, to pick up pointers that will help you incorporate better stories in your own products!