Having dipped my toe into producing quizzes for my subject using Captivate 2 (thanks to Andrew Brown for his tutorials), I recently received details allowing me access to the authority's Breeze server.
I've now made a couple of quizzes using the Breeze plug-in (for which Andrew has promised tutorials in the near future), and it seems to work in a very similar way to Captivate 2 in terms of its quiz making facility at least.
If I had to express a preference, all be it after only limited use, it would be for Captivate 2 over Breeze.
I'm sure that the majority of my colleagues would prefer the familiarity of the PowerPoint front end, and therefore prefer Breeze, but I found it very frustrating not to be able to format the slides as easily as with Captivate. Any attempt to adjust the formatting of a slide in Breeze seemed to make it fail to function entirely once the quiz was published to an .swf file.
Captivate 2 allows much more flexiblity, it's easy to place images into, other than as background, has a much simpler branching facitity and seems to publish quizzes with significantly fewer associated files.
These are only first impressions of using the two packages, and I'm sure that many of these issues can be over come. However, it seems likely to me that less confident users might be put off using Breeze if their end results are not as desired, or cannot be rejigged easily to make them so.
A bug-bear with both packages is the way quizzes are scored. Each question can be allocated a number of points - e.g a matching task with four options might be given four points. If the answer is correct, obviously all four points are scored, but only one error results in the entire answer being treated as being wrong, and consequently no points are awarded.
Pupils getting a bit of every question slide wrong, but getting the majority correct would, by this arrangement, be awarded no points for the entire quiz. A little demotivating surely?
Having said all of this, I'm quite prepared that in all likelihood this has transpired due to my lack of knowledge and ability in setting up the quizzes correctly, and that there is a way to overcome this.
As usual, any advice, comments or criticism will be gratefully received.
If I had to make a choice between the two I would agree with you too here Drew. My biggest gripe with a 'Breezo' (the bizarre, yet apt name for a Breeze presentation!) is the 'theme' that the presentation has to sit in. Whilst this may be a great tool for business, I think it is too much of a distraction compared with the cleanness of a Captivate project. Compared to Flash however...
The scoring thing is a major disappointment - isn't it? The problem is the instant feedback given, as the student is immediately demoralised by it. On the plus side though, all the data is tracked for the teacher, so when you analyse the data you'll know that the student got 3 out of 5 matching elements right, so it's not a complete lost cause? (I'll have a think about this though - there may be a workaround for the instant feedback?)