Are you looking to develop training courses without the help of a professional instructional designer? If yes, you can build up rich and interactive sessions with the use of instructional design software or rapid authoring tools. However, it may be challenging for you to select the right design software tool that caters to your need. Through this guide, we will help you to choose the right tool for creating a practical training course for your employees.
When you are deciding which instructional design software you need, consider these following questions
• Does the product come with training or online support? How complicated is the product, and can it be taught? Are there others in your business or group using the tool?
• What is your business willing to pay for? Explore all alternatives, including free of charge, open source, and commercial software.
• What kind of files and images will you be functioning with? Will your product be able to be uploaded to your Learning Management system (LMS)?
• What functionality do you require? Are you forming videos, audios, or gamifying your online classes? Do you want to gather data to review the efficiency of your content?
Adobe Captivate
This software helps you to make responsive elearning content and convert non-mobile courses to mobile learning content. You can use Adobe Captivate to create courses and tests on LMS, presentations, videos and many more. There are various options available on Adobe Captivate that appeal to both non-technical users and highly skilled instructional designers.
iSpring Suite
An authoring toolkit that you can use for developing elearning courses in Microsoft PowerPoint, you can quickly build courses with surveys, interactions, quizzes, assessments and additional practice material.However, you only need to download iSpring Suite as an add-on for PowerPoint for creating these presentations.
CloudApp
CloudApp is an enterprise-level application that can be used to create content for training employees on software applications rapidly. Explaining a course by essentially showing the steps drawn in it gives a lot more clearness to the employees. CloudApp includes screenshots, GIFs, screen recording, and the editing of captured elements. It is compatible with apps like Atlassian JIRA, Slack, Trello, and Zendesk, and as a result you can quickly share course content for any specific question or course.
Kahoot
Kahoot is a game-based learning and trivia proposal. This is a good quality tool to have as acomponent of your instructional design software collection. You can make quizzes on any topic in any language and run extremely interactive training conference on offline or online mode. Kahoot has a widespread bank of premade quizzes. After an examination, learners can give immediate feedback.
Nowadays the demand for effective corporate training has grown exponentially. Therefore, you can use these authoring tools to make your elearning training experience more successful. Using instructional design software is one of the smartest ways to make your employee training engaging, fun and inspiring. As a result, it will boost your employees’ productivity.
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.