Company/Product Details
Product Review Date: April 21, 2014
Company Name: SHIFT eLearning
Company Website: http://shiftelearning.com
Country of Origin: Costa Rica and Mexico
Year Product Launched: 2012
Per-user Pricing: Ranges from $100 – $350 per month per user
Free Trial: Yes
Authoring Tool Review:
Headline: Looks promising but needs work and is too expensive compared to more established competitors.
The eLearning Network signed up for a free trial and attempted to participate in a one-on-one product overview/demonstration by Shift. Unfortunately the Skype connection was plagued with technical problems on the Shift side and for whatever reason we were unsuccessful in completing a proper demonstration. We will continue our review to the best of our ability and revise this post accordingly.
This tool looks to be a first-generation product that has a promising list of features and capabilities but poor execution at this time, especially when considering the comparatively high price point ($1,200 – $4,200 US per user per year). The user interface is unnecessarily confusing and many of the icons/names for the various features are not intuitive. For example the “Publish” feature is called “Build Course” and we have no idea what the prominently displayed “Fill audio types” button does. Even the basic “My Account” log in page was oddly formatted (looks like HTML formatting error – see image below). Not a good sign when you are attempting to log in to an expensive web-based authoring tool that will be mission critical to your eLearning initiatives.
Much of the web-based interface will be familiar to users of Lectora, Litmos Author, and comparable web-based authoring tools. The course demos that we reviewed were fairly simplistic “rapid eLearning” demos so it is unclear at this time the extent to which great looking and sophisticated eLearning can be created natively within this application.
Collaboration
- Multi-authoring capabilities: Yes
- Reviewer feedback tool with status reporting: Maybe – interface was confusing and unclear as to this feature
- Shared digital asset manager with multi-level folder hierarchy:
- Course check-in/check-out for version control: Yes
- Version Archiving and Roll-back features: Yes
- Multi-lingual user interface support: Supports English, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan
Publishing Options
- HTML5 Output: Yes
- SCORM 1.2 (HTML5 and Flash)
- SCORM 2004 (Flash only)
- XAPI (Tin Can): NO
- Quality of Mobile Output: To be tested
- Responsive: Not
Course Design/Author Tools
- User-friendly authoring interface: Interface is just “OK”. Some features have confusing names.
- PowerPoint Import Tool: Unknown
- HTML5 Import Tool: Unknown
- Built-in Screen Layouts:
- Built-in Audio Recording Tool:
- Spell & Grammar Check:
- Built-in Page Templates:
- Customizable player interface:
Screenshots:
