Rapid elearning authoring tools are more and more common nowadays. Many elearning solution companies are using them to design interactive elearning courses. There is dozens of professional rapid elearning authoring tools available in the world now. However, what is the core benefits of using rapid elearning authoring tools, and how to choose the best elearning authoring tool to suite your needs and assure the return of your investment? That’s what I want to share today.
Design an interactive elearning course is a long process that needs your patient from start to the end. It can be a weeks-work or even a months-work depending on how many scenarios, objects and multimedia you use in your course. A rapid elearning authoring tool is usually designed to help you develop elearning course quickly and effectively. It can help you save either working hours or labor cost no matter you are an organization or an individual. Here are top 5 benefits of rapid elearning authoring tools you should know:
Top 5 benefits of rapid elearning authoring tools you should know
1. Save your time in creating elearning courses quickly
The first and foremost benefit of rapid elearning authoring tool is to help you save your time in creating elearning courses. Rapid elearning authoring tools often come with intuitive user interface and simple to use features with little or no training at all. They can help you to create your elearning courses quickly with their great number of pre-built templates, characters and so on.
2. Reduce elearning development cost
Rapid elearning authoring tools also help you to reduce your elearning development cost too. As an elearning developer, no matter you are creating courses for your organization or your clients, you’ll always need to keep it at low cost. Rapid elearning authoring tools can help you to reduce the time and resources needed to create your courses by their ready-made assets libraries and templates. Added to that, with a powerful rapid elearning authoring tool, you can complete an elearning project by yourself instead of a team.
3. Improve your elearning development productivities
As said, rapid elearning authoring tools often comes with pre-built templates and ready-made functionalities. If you can make use of these resources, your elearning development productivities will be increased. Added to that, once you finish building your first courses and want to build a new one, these tools will allow you to modify or customize the existing one to create similar courses quickly.
4. One course for all platforms
Nowadays, most of rapid authoring tools support responsive course design which means that you can create only one course version to run on all platforms such as: mobile devices, web browsers. Gone are the days that you have to create one elearning course for desktop, one course for smartphones and one course for iPads or tablets. This option can help you saving a lot of time if you want to modify or update your elearning courses.
5. Better control over your elearning courses
Rapid elearning authoring tools often provide you a way to protect your project by a secured password. This means you can protect your courses in shared environments without worrying about losing the courses.
Ok, those are the most important benefit of rapid elearning authoring tools from my point of view. However, in order to choose the best elearning authoring tool, you will need to consider many other things. In order to save your valuable time, I will give you an example of a good elearning authoring tool for creating elearning courses quickly and professionally.
The best rapid elearning authoring tool – ActivePresenter
Many users often use ActivePresenter to record screen and edit videos. But the app has another powerful capability which surprises you for sure. It is a professional rapid elearning authoring tool you can trust. Why?
1. ActivePresenter can meet your needs
In terms of eLearning design, ActivePresenter offers many advantages which satisfy you.
First, the app is suitable to create interactive presentations, games, videos, or simulations for any purpose. For example, you can use the app to make a series of quizzes for kids or a simulation exercise in recruitment. Second, ActivePresenter also comes in handy when you want to use different levels of interactivity in your lessons, from no interaction to full immersion. It doesn’t matter whether your goals are simple videos or complicated contents like drag-n-drop interactions.
More importantly, it’s possible to use ActivePresenter for linear and non-linear eLearning design. You won’t thus get into trouble even if your learners need different levels of guidance.
2. Easy to Use
ActivePresenter team puts a lot of effort into bringing the best experience for users. It’s easy to install, activate, and work with the app. You don’t need to wait so long for setting up this app on your computer. The installation process finishes in a matter of second. Besides the installation, the updating is also simple. When there is any update, an update notification dialog box appears on the screen. Just click OK to run the process.
ActivePresenter has a consistent and standardized user interface across all the screens. Tabs, buttons, commands, and the like are in place so you don’t take much time to find. Tooltips and error messages are clear and understandable. What’s more, snapping objects to each other or to the Canvas is worth mentioning. This feature also appears in the Timeline pane.
By default, ActivePresenter shows the Slide, Properties, and Timeline pane. But you can hide them to increase the workspace. There are more customization options in Preferences, allowing you to customize UI the way you like.
In a word, despite a multifunctional tool, ActivePresenter is easy enough for even beginners to use.
3. Support Media
As I said earlier, ActivePresenter is also a video editing tool. So, media supporting comes as no surprise. Yet, the best thing is that the app offers a powerful Timeline pane to edit video/audio, which it’s hard to see in many other authoring tools. You are free to use all video editing features, even in eLearning design.
To use screencasting in eLearning, you should consider ActivePresenter as your ideal tool. Here is the reason: the app allows recording video demos and software simulations. This means there is no need to insert an extra screen recording app apart from your authoring tool. Record everything on screen, capture audio, support automated annotations, or create high-quality screencasts, the app covers almost everything.
4. Provide Annotation and Interactive Objects
ActivePresenter gives you two types of objects: annotations and interactive objects. They are both helpful in eLearning design.
Annotations could be images, videos, audio clips, smart shapes, closed captions, zoom-n-pan, and so on. They make your content visual but cannot interact with learners. In other words, annotation objects don’t require any input from learners.
Meanwhile, interactive objects are meant for responding to learner inputs. In ActivePresenter, they range from Mouse Click, Key Stroke to questions like Multiple Choice and Drag-n-Drop. Using them is a good strategy to imitate real-world scenarios, increase learner engagement, and boost learning performance.
To illustrate, look at our demo Classifying Animals or Drag-n-Drop. It’s clear that ActivePresenter gives you full flexibility to decide what type of content you want to create.
5. Cover Assessment Features
ActivePresenter provides four modes to run interactive courses: Demonstration, Tutorial, Practice, and Test. Demonstration and Tutorial are suitable for teachers to make lessons automatically or manually. Meanwhile, to measure learners’ performance, you should opt for Practice and/or Test. What’s more, the app brings some benefits below:
- Offer feedback messages like correct, incorrect, hint, and timeout ones.
- Support question pools (also question banks) to design random quizzes.
- Configure the number of tries allowed for tests, quizzes, or questions.
- Get valuable insights into the number of correct and incorrect answers, slides viewed, and points gained. From here, you may know what strengths and weaknesses of your learners are.
- Define what engage and attract your learners most. For example, if there are more learners doing a quiz than any other quizzes, it may state that learners much prefer that quiz.
- Send reports about learners’ results to a specific HTTP address.
In case you don’t know: ActivePresenter is also compatible with LMS. This means if you use the app to design eLearning courses, it’s simpler to assess how well your learners do your quizzes and where you should improve to enhance their retention. The app now supports the following technical standards: SCORM (SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004) and Tin Can API.
6. Make Localization Available
Take a further step to localize your eLearning courses, and they will reach the global audience. In ActivePresenter, you can do this by working with the Localize tab. It has never been easier to adapt your courses to a particular language or a culture.
7. Provide Resources
ActivePresenter also comes with preset object styles and mouse click sounds. Using them, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort.
There is also good news. From the upcoming version 7, ActivePresenter will offer a number of templates, themes, and samples with great design.
8. Offer Proactive Support System
Not only does ActivePresenter provide powerful features but it also has a strong support system. This system includes a proactive online community, reliable documentation, and a constantly updated YouTube channel.
Let’s say you are creating a quiz and don’t know how to insert an audio. Then, you can read the article Inserting an Audio on the Tutorials page, watch the video How to Add an Audio, press F1 to open the Help file or ask a question in the community.
Learn more about ActivePresenter!
Bottom line
It is no doubt that rapid elearning authoring tools provide you many features that you can use to create your elearning courses quickly and professionally. However, how good is your courses depend on more than only a tool. For example: your creativeness, your budget and your experiences. I hope you enjoy this post. Share with me your elearning experiences by dropping me an email or comment here.
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Good luck!
Elearning Supporter 
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