A Learning Management System is one of the best ways for a corporate subject matter expert to deliver e-learning content to employees. But e-learning content does not automatically emerge in an attractivestyle. That’s where the technology of elearning authoring tools enters the picture within the growing Ed Tech Industry. Here we will discuss some of the more popular authoring tools, as each can be custom-made to suit the needs of your training programs.
Adobe Captivate
Adobe Captivate is one of the most powerful elearning authoring tools available for both Windows and mac OS. It allows the user to update information on storyboards that contain elearning elements and publish to the cloud for presentation. Furthermore, you can also modify your courses to automatically adjust or respond to various devices and examine sizes with relatively well-designed layouts and geolocation support. You can also record and introduce multiple video formats and coordinate audio or visuals with slides and instance objects. It also allows you to import your PowerPoint presentations into elearning projects. Hence, it is best suitable for use in corporations and large businesses for creating training courses that look attractive and consistent.
Articulate Storyline
Storyline provides customizable workspaces with basic templates to make entirely eye-catching, immersive, and appealing courses. It is available in five languages and helps you import existing content from PowerPoint slides. You can publish the courses to HTML5 and Flash for use with iPad or Android applications. Users may also make, import and edit audio, images and videos to incorporate multimedia objects into their training courses. You may use layers and triggers for making objects respond to learners’ actions, in order to construct complex customer interactions. Through Storyline, you may also examine learners’ understanding and progress by creating quizzes or import existing content to create a question bank.
However, your developers can create complex learning courses with a professional tool having complex functionality. Storyline also has relationships with elearning heroes, with a robust community site where they can get free templates, and specialised assistance, and users can post regarding ways to take the most advantage of the software.
Elucidat
Elucidat is one of the cloud-based and responsive elearning authoring tools that facilitate teamwork among group members in a training team. One of the features is a comment system like Google Docs so that users can discuss if they need any changes in the courses. It has gamification elements like badges and points to enhance learners’ engagement in the training courses, and analytics to determine course efficiency. Moreover, it offers two extraordinary time-saving capabilities.
Elucidat Rapid Release syncs Elucidat with your company website and Learning Management System so that you can merelymodernise content without the need for re-uploading files on those systems. Another helps you to identify the master elements and change them within the courses where they are needed. For instance, if you change your brand name and put a new logo, then your updated logo will automatically replace the old in all courses.
However, all authoring tools are best for specific tasks and depend on the kind of e-learning courses you want to create. Your requirements like quality and level at which you want to create e-learning will narrow down your selection among the above discussed authoring tools.
If you are an eLearning designer, you should consider using agile instructional design for your learning initiatives. Unlike the traditional methods of course creation, the agile method offers some significant benefits that will ensure that your results are outstanding yet also efficient. Below, we look at some of the top benefits of the agile design method.
Highly Interactive
Agile instructional design is heavily focused on the learners and how they will interact with the course material. At every step of course development, the needs of the learner and the manner in which they will participate and engage with the course will be taken into consideration. As a result, course developers are able to develop training materials in exactly the way a learner would find it easy to understand. This is one of the reasons why many instructional designers are switching over to agile design. After all, if you can produce high-quality, engaging content using agile, why bother wasting time on other, inefficient instructional design methods?
Rapidly Produce Content
A big challenge faced by most course developers is the time required for developing training material. This is mostly because developers usually tend to focus on creating the entire content of the course all at once. Obviously, this is normally a massive undertaking fraught with so many issues that the project will end up taking a lot of time. But with agile design processes, designers can now develop courses faster, using less time and fewer resources. This is because agile methods look at the course development process as consisting of little chunks of content that need to be developed sequentially. Only when one section is finished can the development team move on to the next section. This process of course development ensures that the training material is created within a short period of time.
Better Collaboration
A huge benefit of the agile design process is that it facilitates easier collaboration among multiple individuals. Everyone involved in the course, right from the organization that invested in its development to the actual learners, can collaborate with each other and offer suggestions to improve the course. As a course developer, this gives you the chance to hear the feedback and understand which aspect of the course needs to be developed and what new, potential features should be implemented. This can go a long way in helping you fine-tune your next course.
No Last Moment Revisions Necessary
In the traditional course development scenario, developers often tend to make numerous changes and revisions to the content. This mostly happens because the course is developed all at once, and then largely revised later on at the end of development. As a consequence, designers often need to correct a lot of errors to ensure that the training material complies with expectations. However, since agile development involves completing the course in portions, all errors and changes are addressed along the way. As such, last-minute, large-scale revisions become unnecessary.