Content Builders - Tools For E-Learning Authors

Design may be the most important element in the development of e-learning content, but it’s not always the most difficult. There’s a lot of work to be done in transferring your ideas from the script to the browser and plenty of scope for disaster. In this chapter, I take a look at the tools that are currently on the market to help you ‘author’ your e-learning content and try to work out whether you’re better off with or without them.

When design isn’t enough

Those who have got so far in this book may have detected a certain hobby horse of mine – at least the one I’ve found myself riding most often so far. If you have missed out on all this, let me recap. It’s my opinion that the biggest single problem facing e-learning is the quality of design. Far too many e-learning products are re-workings of CD-ROM designs based on outdated theories of adult learning. We need more collaboration between learners and other humans, more relevant, practical activities for learners to participate in and content that today’s learners will find engaging. If designers have the will to make these changes, then they will find a way. It’s essentially an intellectual and creative challenge.

But, as any builder will tell you, as he looks aghast at the architect’s plans, it’s one thing coming up with a design and another thing entirely constructing it. Building e-learning content is, as they say, non-trivial. And generally speaking, the more imaginative, engaging and interactive the design, the harder it will be to assemble it and then make it work with the browsers used by your target audience, within realistic bandwidth constraints and compatible with those all-so-important emerging technical standards. You get the picture.

The development of e-learning content is just a bit technical and this creates a business opportunity. Find some programmers who positively thrive on technical difficulties, and have them build a tool that reduces the complexities for others, effectively making themselves redundant. Amazingly they will do this and the good news is, they have. The bad news is that the programmers were American and so the tools are called ‘authoring systems’ rather than ‘e-learning development tools’. Unfortunately, these tools will not help you to win any Booker prizes as you can’t do any writing with an authoring system. You can, however, build e-learning content.