4 Difficult-to-Ignore Benefits of a Cloud-Based eLearning Authoring Tool
Your movies, your music, your emails, your photos, and your office documents are all in the cloud. Isn’t it time that your authoring tool was too? Read on to discover four key benefits of a cloud-based eLearning authoring tool that will improve the experience of every content creator and learner in your organization.
1) Ensure easy access for everyone
If a desktop or laptop computer has an up-to-date web browser, it has everything it needs to run a cloud-based authoring tool. If a device of any kind has an up-to-date browser, it has everything it needs to run the content such a tool will publish. Cloud-based eLearning software provides exactly the level of flexibility we have become accustomed to from the software we use in our everyday lives.
There’s no need to download extra software or documents, no need to search for license keys or obtain administrator privileges. You can sit in front of basically any computer, go to a fixed URL and get to work.
2) Get universal and immediate updates for authors and learners
Because of the potential for disruption, teams with desktop-bound software may delay updating or avoid doing it altogether. Any authoring tool worth your consideration should be regularly adding new features and improvements to keep pace with the latest developments. And you want your team to have those latest updates.
By opting for a cloud-based authoring experience, you’re not just opting out of the hassle of that first install of the software on every machine you want people to work on. You’re opting out of manually or automatically deploying updates to all those machines every time the software is updated. You can rest assured that cloud-based updates happen on a provider’s server, on a provider’s time. That means no worries for you.
A similar principle applies when you host your eLearning courses in the cloud. Any tweaks or larger changes made to the course will be delivered without users having to download extra files. If you deliver content via your authoring tool’s hosting options—or at least via an LMS wrapper—the process of implementing course updates can be similarly simple.
For more on LMS wrappers read:
‘Stuck Waiting for Large SCORM Uploads? Release Courses Instantly With an LMS Wrapper’3) Seamlessly collaborate with simultaneous access and editing
Creating great eLearning content is a team effort. On desktop tools, that team is running a relay: every contributor doing their bit and passing the file along like a baton.
Of course, the relay team analogy—and the efficiency of the creation process itself—breaks down in a real workplace. Learning professionals (and the experts they rely on) are rarely waiting, hand outstretched for the next task to arrive. The modern organization is a busy place, our attention divided in innumerable ways, and task availability needs to fit around that. Furthermore, a relay baton has never had to be returned to the first runner to check over alterations made by a later runner.
Cloud-based authoring frees teams to create, review and edit content whenever (and wherever) it’s most appropriate for them to do so, without any version control issues. It’s a truly collaborative environment where individual elements can be discussed and finalized with ease. This is especially true on platforms that feature collaboration tools such as contextual commenting, user roles, and shared resource libraries.
Also on the blog:
‘8 Reasons to Replace Your eLearning Content Authoring Tool’4) Rely on the experts for the safety and security of your data
“The cloud” is a convenient, shorthand, and borderline whimsical term. In reality, your data still exists physically (or at least, electronically) on somebody’s servers, multiple times over.
Choosing a cloud-based authoring tool provider means avoiding the significant overheads of operating your own servers to host tools and/or in-progress documents necessary for content creation. It also means not having to worry about server performance, data backup or intellectual property security—provided that your authoring tool provider is themselves using a trustworthy hosting solution.
Gomo, for example, provides its platform via Amazon Web Services—an organization that is in the uppermost tier of data expertise and capability. Through this arrangement, client data is:
- Distributed across a minimum of three physical facilities
- Automatically replicated to other major international regions
- Protected from everything from system failures to natural disasters by a complex arrangement of power grids, uninterruptible power supplies, and on-site power generation
- Subject to regular data integrity checks
- Proven secure under the ISO 27001 standard, covering people, process and IT systems
Read more about data security and eLearning authoring in our guide:
‘The Power of Security and Cloud-Based Authoring Tool Features’In summary
These four benefits make a cloud-based authoring tool a serious consideration for any L&D team. And as tools like Gomo continue to become progressively more powerful, offering an ever-wider range of features, the space for desktop-bound solutions becomes narrower and more niche. In eLearning, just as everywhere in modern web technologies, cloud-based technology is simply the most flexible, most widely applicable answer for the demands of most creators and learners.