Rapid authoring tools – online course development software that havetransformed the L&D landscape. The advent of these tools has made e-learning development quick and effective. Gone are the days when people had to wait for months to use an e-learning course. Development times have come down by at least 40% thanks to these fast evolving course authoring software. These tools have helped “demystify” e-learning development. It is now possible to develop quality online courses with little programming skills.
We will now look at 3 popular rapid authoring tools used extensively by the elearning community.
Articulate Storyline – a rapid authoring tool used extensively by the e-learning development community. A survey conducted by the E-learning Guild, in 2013, revealed that Storyline is the most preferred rapid authoring software.
What makes this online course development tool immensely popular? Well, Storyline comes with an amazing array of features that go a long way in the development of highly effective e-learning courses, easily, in quick time. Let us look at a few of them.
1. Ease of use
Articulate Storyline comes with a PowerPoint-like interface which is highly intuitive. Anyone familiar with the Microsoft application can use the rapid authoring tool easily. This useful feature results in a low learning curve.
2. Characters
Articulate Storyline has a vast array of more than 47,500 characters in different expressions and various poses. This feature makes the life of visual designers easy and helps reduce the time taken to develop the online course. It eliminates the need to recreate images with suitable expressions, which is time-consuming and expensive.
3. Ability to re-create Flash-like effects
Storyline is widely used to convert Flash-based content into HTML5. The rapid authoring software can be used to re-create most effects of Flash, and this makes it the ideal tool for this purpose.
4. Facility to create excellent m-learning courses
Articulate Storyline is the ideal choice to develop m-learning courses. You can use the tool to produce output in the HTML5 format. You can also use the online course development software to publish content to Articulate Mobile Player, a native app available in iOS and Android versions.
5. Facility of easy translation
It is easy to translate courses developed using Storyline. The content of the courses can be exported as an MS-Word document or XML file, which can be provided to the translator. Once the content is translated, it can be imported into the e-learning development tool and the translated version of the course can be published with just a click. Furthermore, Storyline provides excellent support to languages like Arabic and Hebrew, which are written right to left. The rapid authoring software also provides good support to languages using double-byte character sets (DBCS) such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
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