Top 10 Tools for Rapid eLearning

by Tess Robinson, Director, LearningAge Solutions

We’ve put our heads together and come up with our favourite (mostly free) tools for aiding rapid elearning development. As our team are located all over the world, we particularly love cloud-based tools that allow for collaboration:

MockFlow Wireframe Editor Screenshot

1.  MockFlow – Cloud-based collaborative design tool. We use Mockflow for  wire framing and specifying functionality.
2. Google Drive – easy-to-use document sharing for storyboarding, QA, script writing and media lists. Allows for collaborative working and comments.
3. Survey Monkey – free online questionnaires and surveys. Survey Monkey has been around for a while but still a great tool for gathering user feedback and can also be used to pre-assess knowledge gaps.
4. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) – fantastically named piece of freeware that works on most operating systems for photo retouching, image composition and authoring.
5. Dropbox – collaborative document storage and working. An alternative to Google Drive.
6. Storyline – elearning tool that can develop for Flash and html 5
7. Screenflow – our favourite screencasting tool for the Mac. Easy and quick to use, beautiful quality, smooth movement and glitch-free. Makes high resolution video look fantastic.
8. Mindmeister – online mind mapping software that allows you to create, share and collaboratively work on mind maps. Includes apps for iPhone, iPad and Android so you can see your maps anywhere.
9. iMovie – For people starting out in video editing, iMovie is simply the best video editor. It is not as fully featured as other editors, but the most advanced functionality is either not necessary for basic web video, or you can find work-arounds. Only available for Apple devices.
10. SmartBuilder –  a great and underrated elearning author tool specifically designed for building branching scenarios. It’s got a decent scripting language too.

Thanks to Rob Hubbard, Louise Cox and Ed Hickman for their input into this article.