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Four Authoring Tools that Ensure Greater Learner Engagement

It is a well-known fact that training managers must have good communication skills, advanced research skills, and the ability to plan and organize well. But, along with these skills, a training manager also needs to know about the different tools that help deliver a great learning experience to employees. These eLearning authoring tools help design engaging courses to train your new hires and employees on essential workplace skills.

Explore the tools you as a new-age training manager need to know!

The online training space today is flooded with a huge number of authoring tools, each promising the best of features. And when faced with such an overwhelming number of options, a decision is not very easy. But don’t worry, we have you covered. Bringing you some of the popular authoring tools, we explain how these can be the right fit for your organization’s online training needs.

Authoring Tools Offering an Engaging Learning Experience

1. Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate’s user-friendly interface makes creating eLearning courses a hassle-free job. The tool’s Asset Store offers 75,000 + free eLearning assets such as scenarios, themes, images, and characters. While these in-built features help build engagement, the software also lets you import videos, fonts, slides, etc. from other applications such as YouTube and PowerPoint.

With Captivate, creating virtual reality-based scenarios is also possible. 360° images and videos can provide learners a highly immersive learning experience. Using their VR headsets, learners will be able to experience real-life scenarios in 3D, learn new skills, and apply them instantly.

You can also make learning fun by adding quizzes and games to the courses. Accessibility across mobile and desktop devices makes course consumption easy and intuitive, and takes care of adoption challenges, leading to higher completion rates.

The authoring tool also offers a host of other features that can be used in various training scenarios to empower course developers to make their courses more engaging and immersive.

2. Articulate 360

Your search for an authoring tool with high-end functionalities ends right here! Because Articulate 360 with its options for video creation and editing, quizzes, and ready to use course templates is just right for all your designing needs. And what’s more, its web app Review 360 enables easy collaboration with stakeholders for gathering and sharing feedback, thus speeding up the development process. The tool also solves the problem of creating multiple versions of the course for different devices, as it automatically adapts to them all.

From beginners to expert HTML5 web designers, the software’s intuitive user interface makes it every course creator’s favorite go-to tool. But if you are not comfortable using new tools, don’t worry. Articulate 360 Training helps you become a pro in no time at all – with access to videos and webinars on every topic by the likes of Tom Kuhlmann and other industry stalwarts. When you subscribe to Articulate 360, you are given access to both Storyline 360 and Rise 360. However, you have the option to choose one of the two according to your organization’s requirements.

Storyline 360 with its numerous features helps turn your vision of creating an engaging learning environment into a reality. Its pool of 8.3 million assets that can be accessed from its ‘Content Library 360’ enables you to design customizable content, quickly. Apart from this, you can also use the authoring tool for creating quizzes and for reviews, thus offering greater user interaction.

Unlike Storyline 360, Rise 360 doesn’t require the software to be installed on your desktop, since it is a web-based authoring tool. While many of its features overlap with those of Storyline 360, Rise 360 offers an additional feature that allows designing courses using Blocks. You can provide employees a unique training experience by adding text, videos, tables, images, and quizzes in the Blocks.

3. Lectora

Lectora enables course developers to create highly interactive and engaging eLearning courses. Lectora offers two versions of the software – Lectora Desktop21 (the latest desktop version) and Lectora Online 5.0 (its latest online version). Subscribers can go for Silver, Gold, or Platinum Suites to gain access to the versions according to their needs.

Lectora offers a comprehensive guide known as Knowledge Base and instructor-led training classes by Brookwood and Interactive Advantage to help you get started. You can also join the Community to clear any doubts about its usage. The tool adapts well to all viewing devices, thus saving you the trouble of tweaking the content for every device.

Lectora’s offers you numerous features that will help you build stunning courses. Additionally, the built-in Asset Library offers 135,000 + icons, 100,000 + characters and stock audio files, 120 million + stock images, 55,000 + stock videos, and 9000 + PowerPoint templates. And the best part is that all these are customizable. You can also use screen captures to visually communicate technical processes in the courses.

If your legacy courses were created in PowerPoint, Lectora enables them to be imported into and included in your new courses. Lectora’s ReviewLink tool allows for online course reviews and feedback from various stakeholders ensuring you don’t lose precious time waiting for their approval. All in all, Lectora empowers course developers to create exhaustive content as desired.

4. iSpring Suite

Do you use PowerPoint to make presentations for online training sessions? If you do and would like to convert your PPTs into interactive eLearning courses, you have an easy solution – go for iSpring Suite that co-exists with PowerPoint and makes course development seamless. Integrating into PowerPoint as a plug-in, iSpring enables you to make presentations and offer an engaging e-learning experience through its advanced features and innovative toolkit.

Explore the steps to convert classroom training material to eLearning.

The iSpring Content Library boasts of 200 + ready-made templates, 67,000 photos of characters, 1023 high-quality location images, and 14,000 + icons and buttons. Bringing all the content to your fingertips, iSpring Suite makes course development a timesaving and easy process.

Collaborating with project stakeholders and receiving feedback becomes easy with iSpring Space. With a ton of options to design quizzes and question types, the tool helps you develop various assessment modules. In addition to videos, you can also record video lectures making courses more interesting for learners. Once you develop an eLearning course, publishing it on the web and any LMS is very simple. iSpring adapts well to all screens and has no configuration issues. With new features being released every month, the authoring tool ensures it is up to speed with the latest market needs and trends.

In Summary

Training managers are constantly under pressure – to create courses within very short timelines, while still ensuring learner engagement. And that’s where an authoring software comes into the picture. An essential tool, it eases the process of developing online training content, saves the organization both time and money, and most importantly, helps engage learners.

This blog highlighted well-known eLearning authoring tools in the market. But there is a lot more when it comes to eLearning. If you want to know more and become the leader in your field, download this eBook.

The eLearning Champion’s Guide to Master Design, Delivery, and Evaluation