Last week I spent some time talking about the Development phase of Instructional Design, but I got bogged down with itemizing the various elements that you might develop, so I didn’t get to talk too much about my favourite part of development. In e-learning, this would be the authoring element of development!
This week, I thought I would chat a bit about some of the authoring tools that are used for e-learning development, and what I think about them.
Within very first development gig, I spent a ton of time working in an internal Learning Content Management System (LCMS), and I have to say that for all the little bugs, I truly believe our company could have brought it to market and it could have been a big deal. After having worked in several other LCMS’, I feel pretty comfortable saying that it was one of the most user-friendly tools I have ever used. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it’s being used any longer and therefore is definitely not out in the market…an e-learning industry’s loss -sigh-.
This position also afforded me the opportunity to work within OutStart and Ilias…which were alright, but not for me. Ilias was Linux-based, and I just didn’t have enough familiarity with it to really form much of an opinion aside from noting the inconvenience of working in an almost entirely Windows-based office. OutStart was alright, but it was buggy, expensive (for what it is), and had one major character flaw (at least in the version we had access to): any of the developers could accidentally delete an entire program…you know a series of courses that a team of 20 had worked tirelessly on for months. Whoops! It did have a lot of helpful features for course development, but I often found myself looking for workarounds to get things functioning properly.
I was introduced to Adobe Captivate, used it for way too long, hated it instantly, and still have a deep-rooted dislike for it. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.
Articulate Studio proved extremely helpful for developing media assets without needing a media team (in terms of interactive graphs and charts – which is what we used it for primarily). It was an extremely under-utilized authoring tool in that corporate environment; however, I’ve since used Studio in my independent development, and I’m still amazed by some of its capabilities – I have one project in mind that had a unique way of using the Player tabs, and I always go back to that one as an aesthetically exceptional use of Presenter, if I do say so myself.
Articulate Storyline has my heart. It’s truly my favourite tool to author in, and the reason you’ll only ever see Storyline samples in my portfolio. Why bother including samples from OutStart or Captivate if I know I don’t want to work within those tools? It’s my favourite authoring tool because it makes my life so much easier! The functionality and features in Storyline allow me to streamline my workflow and development process, which is half the battle. With such a supportive community, I know my inquiries will be responded to expediently, and I won’t have to wait weeks for a response from a support team of 1.
TechSmith Camtasia is my favourite video editing tool. I use it in my independent work, I use it at the university, I encourage all of my faculty members to use it, and it really provides a wide range of video development and editing capabilities with a very small learning curve.
Moodle is the Learning Management System (LMS) the university uses, and while it’s not flawless, it does exactly what we need it to do, which is great for an open-source LMS, and for a university known as ‘the’ distance university in our region.
I’d love to hear about the authoring tools you’re using and your experiences with them, so let me know in the comments below!
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