Authoring Tools Several questions came up recently around Authoring Tools and I wanted to point people to some past posts on authoring tools that I think serve as good foundation.

I’ve been slicing and dicing our Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase and doing some online research in response to a question about collaborative rapid authoring tools that developers in multiple locations can use.... After looking at the Authoring Tool KnowledgeBase I went to my LinkedIn and Twitter network. Immediately heard back from two people.

It's definitely the time of year for authoring tool releases, with Adobe announcing their eLearning Suite and a version 4 of Captivate , an extensive upgrade to the 200+ interactions in the Raptivity library, and now Caspian Learning's Thinking Worlds , the first tool that I know of to support the rapid creation of immersive, single-player 3D worlds for learning. I know the guys at Caspian well and I've had a little bit of influence on the design of this tool, so I'm delighted that they've been able to move mountains and get it to market so quickly...).

I don't know if I've seen this reported by the eLearningGuild , but their reports showed some interesting information about satisfaction levels reported by members on course authoring and rapid eLearning tool satisfaction levels. Unfortunately, my blog is not wide enough for these images, so click on the image to go to a page with the full size image.

I've been asked several times a similar question so I thought I would throw it out to see what readers here will recommend for doing basic video-based elearning authoring.... They do not want an LMS because of some false starts and perceived complexity. Other factors - Need an inexpensive solution, but does not need to be free . Should be an easy to use and easy to maintain solution.

You need to be really trying to create something that is realistic. 2. Download a free trial of one of the more common authoring tools. My personal suggestion would be either the Articulate Free Trial or the Captivate Free Trial .

Someone posted a comment in my previous post on Course Authoring and Rapid eLearning Tool Satisfaction asking whether I had used RapideL. The answer is that I've only seen it demoed. But when I looked back at my post, I realized that I had cut off quite a few authoring tools because I had only included reports where the number of evaluations was 15 or more. So, I've redone the graphics to include those with more than 5 responses.

I was just asked a question and was a bit at a loss for a response. This organization predominantly has Macs and would like to use something like Articulate or Captivate to: "convert our existing Powerpoint trainings, include quizes, track responding, track time spent enaged, insert Quicktime movies and deploy via the web." For so long, Adobe has had products on both Mac and PC, I assumed that Captivate had a Mac version - but I didn't find one. Any suggestions?

I don't know where this appeared from or why but it seems that Microsoft has a rapid e-learning development tool. It's available for free download and there don't seem to be any strings attached. I'm not completely convinced because there's very little information about this product and it certainly isn't being marketed heavily. My best guess is that this is a tool used by Microsoft itself or by one of its contracted developers, and someone suggested making it more widely available.

Two situations recently have got me thinking about e-learning authoring tools. Firstly, I've been doing some more work on the script for The 30-minute masters which, if you remember, aims to teach the essentials of instructional design to subject matter experts in no more than 30 minutes.... Secondly, I've been doing some work for a client of mine that has an LMS with some authoring capabilities, trying to compare what they have to offer with what's available elsewhere.