Elearning courses have assumed a new role because they can be pursued by learners from any place.

There are no time-bound and place-bound restrictions on them.

Earlier, elearning was done by programmers who used various software to develop such courses. Tools are available in the market such as Elucidat, Captivate, and Storyline. The usage of a tool depends on various factors which include the budget of the elearning company, how easy it is to use a tool, your technical knowledge, whether you are developing the course in a team, or are a sole author?

Popular tools for elearning today

The amount of elearning content that needs to be produced by you also decides the kind of software that is used. Here is a review of some authoring tools for elearning content:

Articulate storyline: It’s preferable for users who like PowerPoint. This is like a more enhanced version. You can create good interactive courses with software because it has triggers to show changes. It can also be used to capture simulations like Captivate. Storyline has options for creating drag-and-drop quizzes, pick one, and pick many kinds of quizzes. The best feature of this software is that you can change the state of an object and then use this state when the user clicks on this object or any other object etc. It also has the option of showing closed options which the reader can access. Although there can be narration, in the course, closed captions are useful for those who have hearing issues.

With storyline, you can create courses customized for mobile phones, etc. The developers don’t need to work extra to create a course for a mobile phone. Storyline has a responsive design feature available so that the course can be shown on different devices.

Elucidat-It aids the business owner in reducing the cost of their important business training. It can be used to create content that can be easily used on mobile phones. It can also be used to customize the layout of your course. Elucidat also has a responsive design feature that creates HTML5 content. This content can be seen on laptops, mobile phones,” and tablets.

Captivate-It can be easily used to produce customised interactions. You can also get quality simulations with this software. It can be used to capture all kinds of movements of a cursor on the screen apart from the activity of the keyboard. Once you include simulations in captivate, they can also include audio narration for the hint captions on how to do a task. You can also include a highlight box to highlight a certain object like an input box captured during a simulation. There can be many kinds of questions and answer interactivities included in Captivate which include True or False, Multiple choice questions, Fill-in-the-blank, and hotspot, etc. There is a customized “results” slide provided in Captivate which can show his score, the number of questions attempted through variables.

The author of the course can easily include drag-and-drop interactions in this course. There can be hints, correct and incorrect captions shown to the user.

So, an author has to choose these tools based on the quality of the elearning output desired.