After spending several weeks working with Open eLMS AI, I found that it did not meet my expectations as a course developer. Some of the valid concerns mentioned in previous reviews seem to have resulted in a few improvements, including being able to remove their menu logo, fixing a few editor settings, and increasing the number of drafts allowed in each tier. While support was pleasant and fast in answering all of my questions, the tool still has many limitations and performance issues.

(1) On several occasions over the last month, I've been unable to log into the tool even when trying to do so from different networks and devices and even after clearing my cache. Today, for example, I've been unable to log in all day, even when attempting to register a new trial account to see if it was just me. This doesn't instill much confidence when it's a recurring issue.

(2) There's a lot of trial and error in adjusting the course length and wordiness settings to get AI to extract the right amount of information you need. However, each draft attempt quickly adds up in a month based on your plan limits. So unless you are a pro at adjusting these settings and use them regularly, expect a lot of wasted drafts.

(3) There is no way to adjust or preview your original course settings or learning objectives once you generate a course. You can't even revise the original course title until after you export the course, and certain characters like parentheses can't be entered in a title. If you aren't happy with the duration, wordiness, or focus of the generated content and need to regenerate it, none of your original course settings will be saved, so you'll need to make a note of them each time as a reference which is a huge pain.

(4) It's not explained anywhere in the tool that you only need to add learning objectives when you don't have a document to upload. Otherwise, the learning objectives field is essentially ignored when using a PDF since it scans the entire document to generate the course content. However, if you want to extract only a few topics from a document but not everything, I was informed you need to first cut and paste content from it into a Word document and then revise and change the emphasis to certain areas that you want the AI to focus on before uploading it. This is not what I would call smart AI since it requires too much manual effort to narrow down the content focus of a document for the tool.

(5) The editor's UX/UI is unintuitive and looks very outdated. The tool also lacks sufficient help resources within it other than one video. To help course designers better understand how the platform works and be aware of its limitations, the tool needs to provide individual help tips or links to a knowledge base that explains the specific settings through info buttons next to each one.

(6) Viewing courses on a mobile device is quite difficult as you can't easily interact with some buttons that are small and you can't zoom in easily on text. Hence, these courses are not truly responsive like most modern elearning. Also, as another reviewer mentioned, the transcript button won't work on mobile Safari browsers and there is no explanation when it happens. Support indicated that to make the button work, learners need to change their mobile browser settings and allow pop-ups which is problematic since you can't enforce this as it is a security concern for many.

(7) Open eLMS courses aren't as accessible as other elearning tools. For example, if your users need to use their keyboard and a common screen reader, like NVDA, to navigate through a course, they will not be able to easily access previous topics through the main menu.

(8) Another big issue is that there is no previous button for users to easily navigate backward to previously visited sections (it only adds a previous button to screens within the same topic). So, once users have advanced to a new topic by clicking Next, there is no way to go back one slide unless you go through the main menu which is clunky and not intuitive. Also, Open eLMS' current design requires the learner to initially navigate course content in sequence in order for the menu to work properly. If you attempt to add buttons that allow learners to access topics out of sequence, the menu will not show them as visited until they visit them in sequence. However, this restrictive navigation design does not allow for branching or for learners to pick the topics they want to visit first. Even PowerPoint allows navigating slides out of sequence and even allows the previous button to return to the last visited slide (even if out of sequence). The most popular elearning tools, such as Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline, also allow this. This is referred to as "History Navigation" or "Last Slide Viewed" and is an industry standard.

Overall, Open eLMS AI needs serious improvements in its performance, ease of use, and versatility. Once these are made, I would be happy to update my review.